Who are You Watching?

Sydney Sweeney finds out there's more to spying on your neighbours than you might expect in 2021's The Voyeurs. It's basically a loose remake of Rear Window but it's quite good for that. The moral crisis Sweeney's character finds herself in in the climax is kind of exquisite.

Sweeney plays Pippa, an optometrist who's just moved into a fabulous new apartment with her boyfriend, Thomas (Justice Smith). Their apartment has massive floor-to-ceiling windows through which they can easily see into the apartment across the street. That apartment also has the massive windows but the curtains are never closed and the lights are always on. Inhabiting the apartment are a professional photographer, Seb (Ben Hardy), with a studio inside the apartment, and his girlfriend, Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo). The two don't seem at all conscious of the fact that their most private moments are on display for everyone across the street.

One flaw in the film's logic is that it doesn't consider the possibility of anyone else in Pippa and Thomas' building being able to see these neighbours and events proceed as though only Pippa and Thomas can see in. They are thus forced to grapple with the responsibility they have for witnessing disturbing incidents.

Some reviews say the second half of the film is ludicrous but I'd say those critics forget the fact that first part of the film is also ludicrous. It's just that the first part of the film gives us a premise we're more used to accepting in fiction. Hitchcock played with this idea in Vertigo in which the first half of the film gives us a bunch of absurd stuff we're used to accepting from movies, but then Hitchcock pulls the rug out from under the viewer. The Voyeurs doesn't do that but it does go somewhere interesting. I suspect the second half of the film was taken in a slightly different direction than what was originally in the screenplay after Sydney Sweeney was cast because it makes very good use of her famously "good genes". But it works wonderfully.

The first half of the film does a good job of slowly building Pippa and Thomas from characters who can't help watching what's very much on display to actively spying, going to complicated lengths to improve their surveillance methods. It's Pippa in particular who compulsively concocts moral justifications despite the fact that she's primarily deriving sexual gratification from the experience. This shaky moral ground leads to some scenes of impressively sexy subtext when Pippa finally meets the two neighbours, particularly in the case of Seb who, with his photographer's eye, turns the tables on Pippa. What happens to Pippa after that is a bit underplayed in my opinion. She's subjected to such severe physical and psychological violation that I feel like her trauma would've been far greater than what we see. But there is a sequence of Pippa really losing her shit and smashing things and Sweeney's performance does convey the idea of someone being stripped of both confidence in her capacity for rational thought and all sense of moral justification so. She's almost bestial, driven back to a primal motive.

The Voyeurs is available on Amazon Prime.