"Windfall" REVIEW

There's something undeniably retro about Windfall. With a few technological exceptions, Windfall could have been made in the era of Rear Window or Wait Until Dark. There's a distinct impression that the movie wants to be considered alongside the work of Alfred Hitchcock in everything from the style of the poster to the opening credits to the soundtrack.

As in a lot of classic thrillers, the premise is pretty lean. A man robs a massive estate, complete with its own sprawling orchard. It's a vacation home for some wealthy person who looks to escape from the city. Everything is going well until the owners unexpectedly arrive.

This is the pressure-cooker of a situation that the characters find themselves in. For various reasons, no one can leave immediately. The robber has all the power in the situation, but the wealthy CEO who owns the place doesn't seem to realise that. Maybe he's grown too accustomed to always getting his way. It's a bad situation for everyone, and it could go badly really quickly.

The cast is small. Jason Segel plays the robber (named in the end credits as "Nobody"), Jesse Plemons is credited as CEO, and Lily Collins plays the role of wife. All three of them do an admirable job. Segel brings his usual, slightly-neurotic energy. He's convincingly desperate as the robber, and he's generally pretty sympathetic. Plemons is smug and self-satisfied. He performs the part of the billionaire convincingly. Meanwhile, Lily Collins exact affiliation is harder to parse, providing the movie with its only real nexus of ambiguity.

If you want to do an analytical read of the movie, you could see them as three different social classes. The robber has nothing. He's the underclass. The CEO has everything. He's the .1% of the 1%ers. The wife married into money, so she has a foot in either camp. The robbery at the center of the plot gives everyone an opportunity to opine about the value of money, the problem with society today, who deserves what and so on.

There's a tension there, and it leads to some of Windfall's better scenes.

The problem is that a premise is only as good as the way the movie delivers on it. You have tension from these three characters being thrown together. But where does it go from there? What do you do with this premise?

About an hour into the movie, the tension actually begins to pick up. Before there, some of the scenes are genuinely comical because of the robber's ineptitude. But between those two points (humor and tension) there's a long, slack mid-section to the movie where nothing feels particularly fresh or original. The stakes will escalate, but that won't happen until the last half hour.

There's very little during that slack middle that will surprise the audience. Imagine a marriage between a tech billionaire, career-driven CEO type and a former assistant. Can you picture it in your mind? Okay, do you imagine that there might be some underlying tensions there? Do you think that there might be some cause for their marriage to be unhappy?

The movie wants to use that slack middle to reveal the details of the character's lives, but there's nothing particularly interesting about these characters. They are essentially archetypes, and their interactions get pretty dull after a while. It's not that the actors or failing, and it's not that there isn't potential for interesting material here, but the movie seems content to function basically as you expect it to.

Take this line from CEO, for instance:

Do you wanna be me? Is that it? Because let me fucking tell you, it's not all it's cracked up to be. Try being a rich white guy these days.

It doesn't matter how good Plemons is in this role. No actor could perform hard enough to add subtlety or nuance to that line.

Having established the premise, the movie needs to kill time until we get to a climax. The characters are stuck together, waiting for the moment when they'll be released from each other. They are just trying to kill time until their situation ends, which results in a movie that feels like it's just trying to kill time until the credits role. This would be one thing if the characters were particularly interesting, but they aren't.

Thrillers often find energy from twists, and there really aren't any worth mentioning in the middle hour of this movie.

This leaves potential for scenes of dark comedy, but even with some solid performances, their interactions end up pretty flat.

As far as social commentary goes, Windfall has nothing to say that hasn't been said already and said better. Have you seen Parasite? Knives Out? Ready or Not? All of those make similar commentary about class struggle in the 21st century, but all of them make that commentary sharper and with more surprise.

You would be more entertained by watching any one of those movies than spending the requisite time with Windfall. Windfall is a thriller with very few thrills or a dark comedy that's light on laughs. It's slow, plodding, and pretty predictable, and even three solid performances give the movie very little in the way of entertainment value.

"Windfall" is available via Netflix.