THE VOYEURS (2021) is a type of movie I really don’t think I’ve seen before: an erotic thriller that feels very now. It has the familiar ingredients of a ‘90s Skinemax joint: voyeurism (of course), extremely beautiful people with enviable living situations, obsession that brings out sides of people they didn’t know were there and slowly erodes a previously strong relationship, deception, forbidden desire, kinkiness, long sexual tension building to super hot but dangerous sex, death, a ridiculous twist. And yet it doesn’t feel remotely Shannon Tweedy. You almost question whether it’s the same genre, but clearly it is.
There are obvious surface reasons for it to seem different. It’s beautifully shot in a modern digital style (director of photography Elisha Christian, COLUMBUS, THE NIGHT HOUSE), so even all the scenes happening in the dark don’t have that faux-noir feel. And there’s absolutely no sexy saxophone (score by Will Bates, LOLA VERSUS, IMPERIUM) – in fact, it uses lots of upbeat electro dance music, and the main characters have what I consider good taste so they’re often listening to Mulatu Astatke and Galt MacDermot and shit.
Also, though there’s more nudity and sex than most movies these days and they’re trying to make it look amazing, it’s not that type where there’s, like, frilly lingerie and a thousand candles lit. So even the horniness is kinda different. The intimacy coordinator is prominently credited – good job Amanda Blumenthal (Euphoria, The White Lotus, BEING THE RICARDOS).
I didn’t even think of this until now but I suppose it’s unusual that the repressed protagonist tempted into unleashing their hidden desires and falling into a dangerous situation is the woman. And I think it’s portrayed as her making some unhealthy but also relatable and forgivable choices – allowing her the same leeway they would to horny ol’ Michael Douglas, and it’s the boyfriend who does the whole “I don’t know you anymore, I’m going to go stay with my sister” routine.
But really I think the main thing that feels new about it is that, though it slowly builds some real tension and things get ugly, it just doesn’t have that dour tone I associate with the genre. It’s fun, there are laughs. Not like it’s comedic, it’s mostly just that the lead couple are funny people, they have their ways of joking around with each other, and they don’t know, or later don’t want to admit, the heavy situation they’re getting into, so they don’t take it seriously. They make fun of it.
Okay, here’s the situation. My parents went away for a week’s vacation. Pippa (Sydney Sweeney, SPIDERS 3D) and Thomas (Justice Smith, JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM) are a young successful couple just moving into their dream apartment in Montreal. It really is amazing, but its most prominent feature is its huge windows facing another building, and the very first time they check out the view they see their neighbors, played by Ben Hardy (X-MEN: APOCALYPSE, ONLY THE BRAVE, BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY, 6 UNDERGROUND) and Natasha Liu Bordizzo (Snow Vase from CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON: SWORD OF DESTINY), going at it. They get kind of morbidly engrossed and laugh about it, rationalizing that they must be exhibitionists to that in front of all those windows. But Pippa feels bad so they stop watching.
Then they keep noticing them over there and it’s hard to look away, so it becomes a little hobby to speculate about their lives. They decide to call them Brent and Margo. “Brent” is definitely a photographer, has lights set up in the apartment, and they see him having sex with one of his models. They debate whether it’s cheating or an open relationship or what. Even start telling their friends about them, like they’re soap opera characters.
There’s a great joke set up in the beginning when Pippa says that she was too uptight to enjoy her youth, and now that she’s done with her education and working as an optometrist she wants some time to “make bad decisions.” She means to be wild and spontaneous and stay out late and get drunk but Thomas, a musician who works from home recording jingles, says (maybe jokingly) that he’s been feeling the same way, he was thinking maybe he should start playing accordion.
So one day she’s walking past an antique store and what should be in the window but a beautiful old accordion. She gets a big smile on her face like yeah, I should do it, this will make him laugh. But it turns out she wasn’t looking at the accordion. She buys the pair of binoculars next to it. After her initial discomfort with spying, Pippa quickly becomes consumed by it.
Of course there’s that REAR WINDOW/BEDROOM WINDOW aspect of the voyeurism thrillers, you gotta see something terrible happen and wonder if you should/can intervene, even though it would reveal you were watching. Even this part gets to be a good time in a really funny scene where they notice “Brent” is choking but “Margo” is in the other room working out and keeps not noticing because she has headphones on. The darkness takes its time slowly creeping up on you.
So there’s a point in the movie when I felt like oh shit, I didn’t even notice how tight these screws were getting, now my stomach is getting crushed and I don’t know how long I can take it. It’s after “Margo” happens to come into Pippa’s office to buy new glasses. Turns out her real name is Julia. And she’s really cool. (Ethics require I disclose that Bordizzo is my space crush – I love her as the Mandalorian padawan Sabine Wren on Ahsoka, and it turns out it’s not just the purple hair and the flying motorcycle.)
This is a cleverly directed movie. It opens with a shot looking across a street, into a store window, where it can see through a tiny gap in the curtain of a dressing booth, where Pippa is trying something on, and you almost catch an inappropriate glimpse of her until she turns and realizes it and pulls the curtain closed. Then the credits play over extreme closeups of eyes. Sometimes it’s a little gross (I hate looking at those veins), and you’re so aware of their vulnerability when you’re right up in them. But mostly they look beautiful, these delicate floating puffs of blue and brown. They begin to look like flowers, or paintings.
It could’ve just been “this is called THE VOYEURS so there’s eyes,” but it turns out it’s what Pippa sees every day at work. And I’m gonna guess this is the first time a movie ever made an eye exam seem hot. These two ridiculously attractive women, one who has been secretly watching the other one from afar, and now they’re not only face-to-face for the first time, but sitting unusually close, staring directly into each other’s eyes. And we’re very aware of it because we’re up close on their eyes, or on their lips, hearing each time they let out a little gasp of breath, nervous of each others’ presence.
The sexual tension is off the charts, and then they hit it off so well they become friends and later go to a spa together. Literally steamy. But there’s the other tension that if Pippa ever had an opening to pull off an “oh hey, I recognize you, we’re neighbors” then that has definitely closed. Here Julia’s telling her about her photographer husband Seb like she doesn’t know, and Pippa seems on the verge of blurting out “we live across from you, I saw your husband hit you and call you the c-word once, you were accusing him of cheating and he made you apologize, but you were right, we see him fucking his models all the time, you gotta leave this fucking guy.” I happened to pause the movie while it was getting almost unbearably uncomfortable, and was surprised to realize it was only halfway over. Not because it felt long, but because I really didn’t know how much further this could go.
Things turn so ugly that Thomas leaves Pippa over it. Left to her own devices you bet your ass she indulges all her worst impulses! I really liked this part where (we’re getting pretty spoilery here) everything has gone south and Pippa has seen Seb be a total piece of shit for months but also she’s been turned on by some of what she’s seen. And she sees him walk from his apartment to a little bar on the block, so she goes in there. And soon enough she’s going to his apartment with him to take photos, knowing his exact routine to get his models to have sex with him. The reason I love this is that I was laughing at what bad decisions she was making before I remembered that scene at the beginning where she and Thomas jokingly made a toast “to bad decisions.” I guess she called it!
It was pretty late in the movie that I thought “oh yeah, this is a little Brian DePalma.” Because it’s not all that DePalma-esque in its style, it’s mostly just the voyeurism and the obsession, and that it feels more artful than sleazy, but not ashamed to be sleazy. Maybe even aspiring to it. And another thing that reminded me of DePalma is that just like FEMME FATALE it has a twist that just seems so stupid at first that I thought for a minute the movie had committed suicide. But I kept watching (you know how it is, you can’t look away – ask Pippa) and it won me over, in this case with the additional crazy places it was willing to go.
THE VOYEURS is written and directed by Michael Mohan, the same guy who did IMMACULATE with Sweeney, who he’d also worked with on a Netflix show called Everything Sucks!. This is his third movie, his previous ones being about a decade earlier – the indie comedies ONE TOO MANY MORNINGS in 2010 and SAVE THE DATE in 2012.
I think I’ve been converted to a Sweeney fan. When I saw her in MADAME WEB I just knew her from the trailer for ANYONE BUT YOU and hearing her name all the time. I haven’t seen Euphoria and didn’t remember her from THE WARD, THE BLING RING, THE MARTIAL ARTS KID, or ONCE UPON A TIME …IN HOLLYWOOD, and only vaguely from the one episode of White Lotus I had seen. So I didn’t know if people genuinely liked her acting, or just her aggressively hubba-hubba physical characteristics, or some cryptic thing that only people younger than me understand. But between this and IMMACULATE I think she’s really good and unique. She sometimes has this lack of enunciation and almost Valley Girl lilt (though she’s from Spokane, Washington) that suggests an airhead stereotype, but then she can be witty and project an intelligence you might’ve missed at first, so she’s good at these characters who are underestimated or overlooked. Also her natural goofiness can add a layer of dork to disarm her overwhelming Denise Richards qualities, not that there would be anything wrong with arming them. In this one she keeps them safely stored and locked for a while and then suddenly whips them out. Be nice until it’s time to stop being nice.
And all of those things keep you occupied so that when she gets to a really raw emotional place it can blindside you. Oh shit, I didn’t notice her headed there, but here she is. I think she’s good. I hope we get more from the Sweeney-Mohan team.
P.S. This also reminded me of a another recent movie, WATCHER. Much more serious tone, not erotic, more horror, but another really well done modern movie about people’s windows facing each other.
April 16th, 2024 at 8:08 am
Having spent time in the adult entertainment industry as a youth attempting to pay rent, seeing a intimacy coordinator credit (with prominent crediting in their contract, no less!) is always going to get an chuckle/eye roll from me
(back in the unenlightened days, if a director was above and/or too puritanical to — y’know — direct a sex scene, and occasionally be reduced to asking an actor “are you okay?”, they would get one of those sleazoid porn people to come in and do it, taking no credit at all. Some sleazoids even dovetailed this into doing *gasp* straight features. Thank god there’s now trained professionals with bona fide collegiate intimacy training to deal with such things. The director can now hide in video village without embarrassing themselves. And the set is safe from any of those people sullying it.)