In The Desperate Hour, Naomi Watts is a mother grieving the loss of her husband, who died the year prior, trying to help her two kids through the torture of being left behind. Her teenage son responds by rebelling and one Friday morning, refuses to go to school. Patience at a minimum, she goes for a run deep in the woodland near their home and following an assault of interrupting calls, she decides to go off the grid, to ignore others and embrace the peace of the stunning locale. But when she returns to her phone, she discovers that something is wrong. There’s been a shooting at her son’s school and deep in the middle of nowhere, she has to work out whether or not he went to school and whether or not he’s still alive.

Before things go south, there’s an effectively clammy escalation of panic as Watts leaps from call to call, a nightmarish scenario made all the more unbearable when experienced from afar with limited information. But the script, from Chris Sparling isn’t quite ingenious enough to find ways to involve her in the drama. So her understandable desperation quickly turns into rather annoying meddling, repeating herself ad nauseam to people who clearly wouldn’t be able to help and ultimately, turning detective in the increasingly absurd last act.

Back in 2013, Steven Knight’s seat-edge drama Locke showed that the simple activity of watching Tom Hardy on the phone could prove to be as entertaining as any more extravagantly mounted thriller. But Noyce, whose experience within the genre ranges from Dead Calm to The Bone Collector, isn’t able to graduate his film from elevator pitch concept to real justifiable movie. The calls quickly become repetitive and annoying and any early tension disappears as fast as any interest we might have in the safety of Watts and her on-screen son (a last-minute attempt to turn the film into a PSA about school shootings is laughably clumsy). She does try her best and it’s an impressively committed physical performance but it’s yet another non-starter for the actor, whose career has devolved into an unending string of stinkers in recent years.

Other than providing work for a crew who sorely needed it, there’s very little reason for The Desperate Hour to exist.

– Compilation