Windfall (2022)

Directed by Charlie McDowell. Starring Jesse Plemons, Jason Segel, Lily Collins, Omar Leyva. [R]

An unnamed burglar (Segel) is robbing a vacation home when the owners, a billionaire CEO (Plemons) and his wife (Collins), show up, leading to a hostage situation and a lukewarm psychological battle of wills. Instead of embracing the minimalist chamber thriller premise as an opportunity for either suspenseful clockwork plotting or a savage deconstruction of character type and thematic relevance, the filmmakers drag their feet and tensions never get past the simmer stage. It’s as if writers Andrew Kevin Walker and Justin Lader had an idea, sketched an outline, threw in a few dialogue cues, and those pages became the shooting script without any further revisions; it’s supposed to be a complex chess game that the kidnapper and victims are playing, but the players just keep moving their king to the left and right in the back rows until the all-too-predictable “shocking” ending. Segel doesn’t exactly exude menace, decency, or desperation, and there’s no pull or fascination in either the scripting or performance to encourage efforts to decipher the enigma. As for the husband and wife, they’re so obvious in their character traits—he’s exorbitantly wealthy, and is therefore selfish and insensitive, while she runs a charity, and is therefore understanding and trusting—that the inevitable switcheroo has neither teeth nor credibility. Plemons, Segel and Collins are all credited among the producers.

41/100