Hours (2013)

Hours arrives with a premise so lean it could be assembled from a hardware store receipt: a father, a newborn on a ventilator, a hand-cranked generator that must be turned every three minutes, and Hurricane Katrina doing what hurricanes do outside the window. Eric Heisserer directs with a plumber's patience, and Paul Walker, in one of his final roles, spends most of the running time sweating, bleeding, and counting. The film is tense, quiet, and uninterested in saying anything larger than itself. This is not a criticism. It is a description of a rare specimen.

For the purposes of classification, the restraint is total. Katrina carries an obvious and well-documented racial dimension, and the film walks past it without a glance, treating the flood as weather and the city as an empty stage. Looters serve as antagonists, but the screenplay mounts no argument about who was left behind or why, and no critique of the systems that failed them. The mother dies in the first act, mostly to clear the room. The cast is led by Walker and filled out by white performers, with a handful of minority actors in unremarked supporting parts. Nothing here is framed as a statement, because nothing here is framed at all.

There is a rescue dog. There is a vending machine. There is a man shooting at a helicopter, and later a man shot, and a nurse who does not survive her errand. Absent entirely: any lecture, any sermon, any moment where the film pauses to instruct us on how to feel about the preceding ninety minutes. In an era when even the disaster picture has learned to sermonize, this one simply runs out of battery. We are left with a modest, competent thriller and very little to file under social consciousness. The sommelier swirls the glass, finds a plain and honest vintage, and reaches for the next bottle.