The Voyeurs (2021)

Michael Mohan's The Voyeurs arrives as a glossy throwback, an erotic thriller assembled from the spare parts of Rear Window and Body Double and set in a Montreal apartment where the windows are generous and the blinds are never drawn. The cast is more varied than the genre usually permits: Justice Smith anchors the domestic half of the story opposite Sydney Sweeney, with Natasha Liu Bordizzo and Katharine King So in key supporting turns. The film never remarks on any of this. These performers simply exist inside the pulp, and the pulp has no interest in interrogating them.

What the film does care about is the mechanics of looking. Pippa is granted a genuine sexual appetite and a late surge of vengeance, and we could squint and call that agency, though the camera lingers on her body with the same leering patience as the binoculars in her hands. The eroticism is entirely heterosexual and entirely transactional. There is no argument here about desire, power, or who gets to watch whom, only a series of escalating provocations arranged for our benefit. The dead birds beneath the feeder are a clue, not a lament for the planet. Nobody in this story has a politics, and the screenplay seems proud of it.

The finale finds Pippa exacting a punishment of surgical cruelty, and the film treats it as a punchline more than a moral. A faint sneer at the art world drifts through the gallery scenes, where human misery becomes a marketable installation, but the cynicism never coheres into a critique of money. This is a movie that wants to be nasty and mostly succeeds, which is its own kind of achievement. It lectures no one. It has no lesson to impart and no audience to improve. For a certain strain of viewer that reads as refreshing. For the rest of us, it reads as a well-lit room with nothing inside it.