OPEN WINDOWS (2014)

Nick Chambers

Given the recent spate of celebrity cell phone hacks, Open Windows seems especially prescient. Here's a movie that imagines such a scenario and then takes it to the umpteenth degree. Writer/director Nacho Vigalondo specializes in endlessly twisty sci-fi with a down-to-earth feel, such as Timecrimes and Extraterrestrial. This time, he lets his craziest impulses run free, resulting in an irresistibly twisted work of technology-based imagination.

Elijah Wood plays Nick Chambers, the proprietor of a website dedicated to actress Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey). He's been lured to the annual Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, under the ruse of winning a contest that will allow him to meet the object of his devotion. Sitting alone in a hotel room, he is contacted via computer by a guy named Chord, who claims to be Jill's manager, informing him that Jill has cancelled their meeting. To make up for this, Chord sends Nick a hack that grants him access to her cell phone and computer, saying that the poor guy may as well get something out of the deal, even if it is only a small bit of revenge. It soon becomes clear, though, that Chord has much more sinister intentions, and the increasingly hesitant Nick is the tool with which he intends to carry them out. The unseen hacker forces Nick to breach Jill's security further and further, until both their lives are in danger.

It's a clever plot that gets mileage out of modern technological fears. Here's the kicker, though: Open Windows takes place entirely on Nick's computer screen. The whole movie is from the POV of someone looking at his laptop. Different windows pop up, each one showing a different perspective on the main action. Jill's hacked devices, Nick's hacked video camera, and his built-in webcam provide just some of the feeds that we see. Emails, screenshots, and security cam videos are also used. Sometimes the camera pans out so we can watch multiple things happening at once; other times, it zooms in so that we focus on just one window. Vigalondo masterfully weaves around, using the technique to create continually-mounting, fast-paced tension that starts immediately and never lets up. This is tour de force directorial work.

Two significant themes are at play in Open Windows. The first is how inducing panic makes it easier to control someone else. Chord convinces Nick to compromise his ethics just far enough that he could be in trouble if anyone uncovered his piracy. Now on the hook, increasingly extreme measures seem necessary to Nick in order to cover his tracks. This allows Chord to virtually violate Jill by proxy. The other big theme is invasion of privacy in this digital age. We�'e become reliant on devices that can be exploited, meaning that we're never really 100 percent safe. Of course, the movie takes this to an extreme, yet it's a credible extreme because we already know that things similar to what occurs here have taken place in real life. In other words, it�s realistic enough to be uncomfortable.

Open Windows has many twists and turns that catch the viewer off guard. It wouldn't be fair to give anything away, but suffice it to say the movie is more than people sitting in front of computers. The action moves far outside of Nick's hotel room and into the streets, an automobile, and even Jill�s bedroom. And the movie is just as much a character piece as it is a thriller. Elijah Wood gives a strong performance as Nick. Between this and the equally loopy/tense Grand Piano, he's become a master at playing nervous guys taking orders from unseen figures. Wood provides a moral center for the movie, showing how Nick starts off complicit with Chord's scheme, only to eventually find his own ethical limit. The revelation, though, is Grey, who does wonderful work playing a character who starts off oblivious and gradually grows terrified as she realizes that she's at the center of something deeply unnerving.

Wood and Grey are terrific, and so is just about everything else. The last two plot twists are perhaps a bit too absurd, but even then it's hard not to get swept up in the movie's crazy energy and visceral punch. Open Windows is ingeniously structured, masterfully executed, and enormously entertaining.

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Nacho Vigalondo knows how to push our cultural buttons, and Open Windows works as both a crackerjack suspenser and an intellectually chewy meta-commentary on our current fascination with and engulfment by our digital devices. Like a 21st century reframing of Hitchcock's Rear Window, Vigalondo's newest is all about voyeurism, except these days you can never be completely sure that what you�re looking at on the screen of your phone/tablet/laptop/GPS isn�t also staring back at you. Heck, there might even be a psychopath on the other end.

Open Windows' action takes place entirely within those screens. Elijah Wood is Nick Chambers: a buttoned-up, milquetoast fan of steamy actress Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey of The Girlfriend Experience). Sitting hunched over his laptop in a hotel room overlooking downtown Austin, Nick is initially under the impression that he's won a contest and is going to have dinner with the none-too-obscure object of his desire. No such luck. In short order, Nick is contacted online by the mysterious Chord (Neil Maskell), who seems to know all about Nick, Jill, and how to hack into just about anyone's anything especially when it come to Ms. Goddard.

Vigalondo has fun juggling the various digital points of view. Much of the movie takes place on a PC's desktop, with windows opening (ha!) and closing, IMs popping up, and Nick frantically attempting to follow Chord's possibly murderous manipulations.

Open Windows has plenty to say about both the death of privacy and the dominion of the always-connected digiverse we now inhabit, and editor Bernat Vilaplana does a remarkable job of keeping the film's frenetic pace rushing headlong toward an ending that you'll never see coming. Vigalondo's stylistic flourishes aside, that's what makes Open Windows � ahem � watchable: It's a nervy story audaciously rendered.

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This one would make Hitchcock proud.

Open Windows, the English-language debut of Timecrimes director Nacho Vigalondo, is Rear Window for 2014 - only instead of one neighbor spying on another apartment building, everyone is spying on everyone everywhere every second. As a thriller, it doesn't always work. As a technical exercise, it's impressive. As a statement about celebrity and privacy in an era (era) in which we're all on camera all the time, it's fascinating.

Elijah Wood plays Nick Chambers, a celebrity blogger obsessed with actress Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey). Nick wins a contest to have dinner with Jill while she's in Austin promoting her latest movie (at a festival not unlike the recently-held Fantastic Fest; Scott Weinberg even has a cameo in the film), but Jill backs out much to Nick's disappointment. It's then that he's contacted by Jill's "manager" Chord (Neil Maskell), who hooks Nick up with access into all of Jill's devices -- cell phone, laptop, you name it - so he can spy on her via webcam. Before long, though, Nick begins to realize that things aren't quite what they seem. Unfortunately for both him and Jill Goddard, it may be too late.

Because it's pieced together via different web and surveillance camera footage, the entirety of Open Windows plays out over a computer screen without one obvious cut -- the camera just shifts from browser window to browser window (it's easy to see where the cuts are hidden, but they don't call attention to themselves as such). It's a gimmick for sure and it can sometimes take the viewer out of the story; we wonder which angle we are watching or why there's a camera filming what we're seeing instead of following the story (which is a challenge in and of itself; more on that in a second). But Vigalondo is also commenting on the way we process visual information now -- why have only one screen when you can have five or six? Isn't that how we approach everything now, from cable news to the checkout line at the grocery store? Hell, I've got four windows open as I type this review. And I'm only spying on Sasha Grey in one of them.

What Vigalondo is really talking about is our total disregard for privacy nowadays, and the way we've surrendered what little bit we might have had by surrounding ourselves with technology and cameras -- literal windows into our lives that can be accessed by anyone at anytime. Nick knows that what he's doing is wrong but he goes along with it anyway. Why? Because he feels he's owed it. Because Jill Goddard isn't a person to him, just an image to be fetishized. Because he knows that he can't be caught looking. Because it's easy. Because he can. It's all the same kind of thinking that led to the recent celebrity nude photo theft, in which famous women had their lives and bodies splashed all across the internet by assholes who stopped thinking of them as people with feelings and privacy that should be respected. The movie was made well before the massive celeb hacking took place (it premiered at SXSW last March), but Vigalondo predicted all of it.

And then there is the casting of the two leads, which might be the best thing about the movie. Elijah Wood is good, doing the same kind of cornered everyman he played in Grand Piano last year. I'm more excited that he's in the movie at all, because it's yet another chapter in his evolution as the unsung hero of the independent genre movie. His participation helps movies like this get made, while his production company SpectreVision literally makes movies like this. I love this phase of his career.

The casting of Sasha Grey lets us know that Vigalondo is really up to something. As a former star of adult films, Grey is no stranger to being watched on the internet, or to having men obsess over her and view her not as a human but as something they can jerk off to. In Open Windows, she's a famous genre actress who may or may not have a sex tape about to leak; either way, it's being used to promote a movie. A scene in which she's told to strip over a webcam and the way the moment interacts with Grey's own career "baggage" is fascinating; hers is stunt casting in a way, but in the best way because a) the casting informs the role and b) Grey is good in the part). I've been rooting for Sasha Grey to break into the mainstream since her role in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience, because she's someone who has always taken full control of her career and made no apologies for it and because I'd like to think that a country that spends as much money on porn as we do isn't so hypocritical as to act like a former adult film star isn't good enough to star in other movies. The lines are all blurred now anyway, so I'd hate to see Grey punished for doing a different kind of acting before this. I like that she's choosing genre projects, too; between this and Would You Rather, she's showing good, interesting taste.

I'm not sure how well Open Windows will age. It's a film that's so of the moment that it might look like The Net in five years. At worst, it will be a problematic thriller that captures a specific time in our cultural conversation about privacy and celebrity. At best, it's a movie that's going to inspire new approaches to storytelling -- some kid is going to see it and realize he or she can build upon Vigalondo's visual style. I'd be all for it as long as that person recognizes that what the director pulls off in Open Windows isn't a low-budget, low-fi cheat. It's really sophisticated, and it's really hard.

Ultimately, Open Windows is a better movie to analyze and interpret than it is one to enjoy, which is a problem because it's essentially structured as a thriller that's meant to be suspenseful and exciting. Vigalondo's script starts to fall apart as it strains for shocking twists and life-or-death stakes because the technical demands and the crosses/double-crosses get in the way of the thriller elements. It's a movie that could use a bit more De Palma pulpiness to make the medicine go down. Things go almost totally off the rails in the last third, which offers chase scenes that are hard to follow and reversals that only barely make sense. Thankfully, Vigalondo saves it by the end, taking the story in a direction that's bold in its implications -- I was reminded of Snake Plissken at the end of Escape from L.A. And no, that's not a sentence you read very often.

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