‘The Voyeurs’ gets hot and ridiculous on the way to something sobering
No one knows what happens behind the closed doors of a relationship, the saying goes. The exception being, the saying continues, when the doors are replaced by floor-to-ceiling windows, and the very attractive couple doesn’t believe in curtains.
Throughout “The Voyeurs,” an erotic thriller for a screen-centered world, the movie keeps becoming more and less salacious than you think it will. Teasing expectations, stringing you along. It’s no great stretch for a movie called “The Voyeurs” to play with the notion of vicarious enjoyment, but writer-director Michael Mohan brings skill to the concept of seemingly harmless intrusion, at times evoking something Adrian Lyne-adjacent, at times playing like “50 Shades of Grey” if it was good trash, not just trash. (Once words like “obsession” are whispered, you may be closer to Lifetime than HBO.) Meanwhile, Mohan repeatedly cuts between a close-up of an eye and an egg being split open and running out. There is such a thing as seeing too much, the movie says, with all the lightness of a smashed photo studio.
The premise is “Rear Window” by way of the boundary-violating millennial namesake of “Ingrid Goes West”: Pippa (Sydney Sweeney of “Euphoria,” “The White Lotus”) and her boyfriend, Thomas (Justice Smith of “Generation,” “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom”), move into a spacious Montreal apartment across the street from photographer Seb (Ben Hardy) and model Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), who are either exhibitionists or just saving money on drapes. Thomas is curious right away; Pippa, an opthamologist who spends her days looking closely at people who know they’re being examined, isn’t sure they should watch the show that seems to be playing just for them. About four seconds later, they’re glued to the programming and crashing their Halloween party and, well, more, particularly when Pippa feels obligated to inform Julia of Seb’s extremely cavalier infidelity. Soon, to paraphrase Joey Tribbiani, they’re so far over the line that they can’t even see it. The line is a dot to them.
Mohan’s dialogue has a way of underlining itself; more than once a line will feel like it’s from a script, only to inevitably become important later on. And there is both unexamined moral hypocrisy and a rather large logical hole at the film’s center, into which “The Voyeurs” almost falls as it determines to deliver twists as opposed to mere psychological distress. But, blunt or not, this is a film — appropriately set in a place that’s European but also not — in which the form matches the content. Crisp, impossibly clean fantasies, shot almost like a modern “American Psycho” without bloodlust, reinforce the distracted 21st century narrative of life as Instagram story as handheld provider of false connection. Everything is deliberate and yet out of control. How many people ask why they do what they do? How many are surprised at what they see when they finally look up? The nonsensical plunge of “The Voyeurs” prevents the film from sticking its ideas with precision (also, *****SPOILER ALERT*****, very much ripping off “The Shape of Things”), but it’s hard to imagine many people watching it and not having at least modest reason to consider those who see life as content, the extremes that result, and when the façade can’t help but bleed into the reality.
The same policy applies to “The Voyeurs” as to social media: Take it too seriously at your own risk, but don’t pretend there’s nothing there to see.
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