Movies
[Sundance Review] Hitchcockian ‘The Wolf Hour’ is Grimy, Tense and Menacing
It’s Summer 1977, and we’re in a crummy South Bronx apartment. In fact, we never go anywhere else, as Alistair Banks Griffin‘s The Wolf Hour has the minimalist setting and wordy revelations of a one-act play. The entirety of the film keeps us within these dingy and sweltering walls, trapping us as Naomi Watts‘ June Leigh is trapped by her own fear.
June was once a promising counter-culture novelist, but after the controversy of her first novel resulted in personal tragedy, she’s become paranoid and agoraphobic, refusing to leave her apartment even to take out the trash or get her own groceries. She sits on her windowsill, watching the small dramas that unfold on the streets below, chain-smoking and pointedly ignoring the stacked, typewritten pages that once constituted the first draft of her follow-up novel. Meanwhile, we hear headlines on her radio or TV as Son of Sam terrorizes the city, preying on women who look an awful lot like June, haunting the boroughs’ streets. “Hello from the gutters of New York,” he writes to the newspaper.
The Wolf Hour is as much, or more, an examination of the artistic process as it is the story of one woman’s fear of a prolific serial killer. We learn through a visit from June’s oldest friend Margot (Jennifer Ehle) that June is brilliant, the sort of staggering natural talent that almost feels like an injustice to the rest of us (like Margot) who have to toil for recognition. But the pressures of her phenomenally successful first book, coupled with the fallout after its publication, have left her paralyzed, stuck, trapped inside herself. June’s world is so internalized, but thanks to clever staging, the window theatrics and visits from outside guests like Margot, Freddie who delivers June’s groceries (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and an escort June hires to ease her solitude (Emory Cohen, who’s especially great here), her world never feels static to us.
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And so much of that, of course, is due to Naomi Watts, who gives a remarkably forceful performance for a woman who barely leaves her windowsill and almost never changes her shirt. The Bronx – once home to June’s beloved late grandmother, who made her home a safe place for June in times of turmoil – is changing beneath June’s window, turning into a “war zone,” and June’s door buzzer goes off two to three times a night, but no one ever responds. Sure, it could just be kids messing around, but June’s convinced someone’s trying to intimidate her, to punish her for her hubris in publishing that first book, in enjoying its success before it destroyed everything. We see all of this play out in Watts’ extraordinarily expressive eyes, in her face and posture, understanding more about her than The Wolf Hour ever has to put into words.
The Wolf Hour‘s definitely nodding to Hitchcock here – surely it’s not a coincidence that June’s last name is “Leigh,” like one of Hitchcock’s best-known leading ladies, though the film The Wolf Hour evokes best is obviously Rear Window, with June’s emotional disability mirroring Jeff Jefferies’ physical one. But The Wolf Hour is a much grimier, sweatier film than any of Hitchcock’s more fastidious horror. It’s a tense movie, quiet and menacing, but it’s also one about redemption. The Wolf Hour tells us that our art can lay us bare, leave us vulnerable, even hurt those around us – but it can also save us, cleanse us, give us the courage to leave the cages we’ve built for ourselves.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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