Review of The Voyeurs (2021) by Hnestlyonthesly — 14 Jan 2023

The Voyeurs is a fundamentally stupid film and it's important to recognize that before getting angry about the time it's stolen from you that you will never, ever get back. It bills itself as a sexy, playful inheritor to voyeur genre films like Rear Window, Blow Up, the 'Burbs, and would-be-solved-if-she-got-a-job movies like Puzzle and Woman in the Window. Detective Pikachu and Sydney Sweeney make an unlikely pair of mousey hipsters, living their best life writing jingles for American pharmaceutical commercials for ED and helping people find their best selves in new glasses. Despite the fact that there are some overtures at trying to make biracial sexy--most of the pairings for sexy sex scenes are between our impossibly ripped and disappointingly puerile-faced boy next door--Detective Pikachu is neutered and the climactic tryst is between the two white characters of the movie who've been magnetically pulled toward one another the entire time. The movie is poison because it takes about half an hour for the girl next door to kill herself in a fit of passion after her husband's infidelity is revealed to her anonymously through a printer (presumably because it was the cleanest visual they could come up with without involving texting?). The husband doesn't bother to investigate the anonymous notes directing his suicidal wife to search for condoms in the bathroom, because why would he? Which is one of the many problems with the premise. All the plotholes don't matter, because they're not plotholes, they're intentionally suspended, so that Sweeney has more rope to hang herself, so to speak. Which, oddly enough, leads me to the second suicide, which is really when this movie goes into warp speed stupid. Instead of getting the emotional climax here, we shift into some lazy, numb montage of grief which has the effect of sweeping what is going to become the pivotal death of the movie under the rug. Sweeney's heart-to-heart with her coworker, revealing her complicity in not one but TWO suicides is a template for the worst possible movie advice, equal parts synopsis and nonsense logic meant to ease Sweeney into a false sense of security for long enough for her to feel sexually desirable enough to put on some makeup and show up for a gallery showing at the boy next door's show. Just in time to discover that--yes, you guessed it--the suicide was performance art the whole time. The first one, not the second one. Detective Pikachu is still dead. But don't worry, his death isn't actually a suicide. It's a murder. This is going to give Sweeney the opportunity to lure the performance artists into her place of work, which is visually important, because we've been primed by cut scenes involving eggs for the past hour to expect that someone's eyes are gonna get crushed. It's also delightfully retrograde that their punishment is that they become visually impaired.

It's hard to overstate how impossibly thirsty this movie is for your attention by the 90 min mark. And as someone who recently spawned a gremlin it's hard not to feel personally victimized by this movie's click-baity approaches.

Simple Google search might have uncovered the fact that the photographer-model couple are, in fact, canny performance artists and--importantly--collaborators, not mismatched lovers caught in an abusive relationship. The premise relies on you accepting that the entire action of the first act of the movie is entirely choreographed for the solipsistic benefit of the Detective and Sweeney, giving it some intense Truman Show vibes but without the benefit, drama, or comedy, of Truman's turn, when he begins to take advantage of the restrictions of his own surveillance.

The Voyeurs would've benefited from cutting their losses early, also, including a pokemon or two? Cannot imagine a film better suited to roll out directly to streaming and fall directly to the bottom of your queue.