'Windfall'

'Windfall': a film noir in the desert, a home invasion with a Marxist twist

Charlie McDowell's new thriller film noir 'Windfall' for Netflix is indeed contained. It has an ironic look, in the colorful sunny California desert with 40s music (Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans) seeming to call for black and white. It is a limited, contained set piece with just four characters. Indeed it follows the story circle idea. But this thriller will not exactly be Hitchcock. It might be a little closer to Billy Wilder's 'Double Indemnity' (1944).

'Nobody', Jason Segel, a drifter, has entered the desert home of a CEO (Jesse Plemmons) and 'the' wife (Lily Collins) looking for cash. When the couple returns, they are essentially kidnapped (held in the sauna for a dangerous while) and the CEO starts the psychological warfare, as the couple gradually gets a little 'freedom'.

A gardener (Omar Leyva) shows up and works the grounds. When the CEO hands the gardener a handwritten note, well, the plot explodes. The wife (who runs a non-profit herself) chides her husband for putting an employee in danger. That triggers a Marxist rant from the 'Nobody' who turns out to be a former disgruntled employee who had been laid off or 'tossed in the trash'. The CEO reacts by essentially calling the Nobody a second-hander (in the Ayn Rand sense) but then also says he feels like he lives with a target on his back. This exchange really gets into the personal vengefulness of the far Left.� The wife seems particularly unnerved by the Maoism, and will lead the fil to a catastrophic conclusion.

For people with accumulated wealth (especially if partially 'inherited') kidnapping is a particularly sensitive issue. Imagine a screenplay where a ('communist'- 'Antifa') intruder tries to abduct a customer at a bank, who refuses to be 'negotiated for', and as a result everyone else in the place is murdered terrorist style but the customer, who becomes a pariah. I thought this idea had been done in the 1970s, but I'm not sure. It's too easy to imagine the screenplay. The Patty Hearst story (books: Toobin's, Nov 9, 2016 and documentaries) is somewhat along these lines. With a 2007 home invasion on a wealthy family in Connecticut, one or the criminals called a homeowner a coward for trying to escape and not being able to protect his family or other people in a real world. That will probably become a docudrama someday, maybe on Netflix.

Name:� 'Windfall'

Director, writer: Charlie Macdowell

Released: 2022

Format: 2.35:1

When and how viewed: Netflix, subscr. 2022/3/24

Length: 92

Rating: R

Companies: High Frequency Entertainment, Netflix

Link: Netflix

Stars: ****_

(Posted Thursday, March 24, 2022 at 12 noon EDT by John W Boushka)

 

Posted onMarch 24, 2022

CategoriesB-Movies, mystery

TagsNetflix