Mark Reviews Movies: THE VOYEURS

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 9, 2021

Writer/director Michael Mohan's The Voyeurs is a trashy little thing. That's fine, especially when the movie embraces its nastier qualities. It's far less effective, though, when Mohan tries to take its premise and its characters too seriously. There's a fine line between trashy and garbage, and when it comes to the drama here, this movie is more the latter.

In case the title doesn't make it clear, the basic premise has to do with voyeurism. A romantic couple, newly living together, discovers that their neighbors across the way don't have anything to cover the windows of the neighbors' loft apartment. The same goes for the protagonists' own loft apartment, with its big and uncovered windows—a fact we notice immediately but that they barely seem to recognize. Let's give their level of intelligence the benefit of the doubt, since they do come up with some clever ways to become better at their spying game.

Pippa (Sydney Sweeney)—who's introduced in a teasingly self-aware scene of her trying on lingerie, before she shuts the dressing room curtain from our prying eyes—and Thomas (Justice Smith) are young, in love, and ready to take the next step in their relationship. They've just signed a lease together.

Pretty quickly, some things become apparent. The neighbors, for example, don't seem to care that anyone and everyone with a view can watch them have some vigorous sex on various fixtures and pieces of furniture. As for Pippa and Thomas, the flame in their romance has dwindled a bit, if Pippa's failed attempts to awaken and seduce a sleeping Thomas in her revealing underwear are any indication.

It's little wonder that she takes a bit more interest and has a lot more investment in the sex lives of the couple across the street. After buying some binoculars, Pippa gets a better view of the neighbors' marathon, multi-position sessions, and that gives her a little inspiration to seduce Thomas—while they take turns watching the couple across the way.

Soon enough, it becomes clear that the guy in the neighboring apartment has a more active sex life than his partner. He's a photographer, and while alone in the studio in the apartment with a line of models, the guy gets them to undress and talks them into having sex with him.

Pippa wants to know more. Is the guy cheating on his wife or girlfriend, or are the neighbors in some kind of open relationship? If it's the former, should she and how would she tell the woman of her partner's infidelity?

To call any of this particularly sexy is a bit of a stretch, since there's something uncomfortable and increasingly unsettling about Pippa and Thomas' nosiness—especially hers, which becomes a rather unhealthy and, later, almost ghoulish obsession. Mohan doesn't seem to be attempting to rouse us, considering the distance with which we observe the neighbors and the brevity of Pippa and Thomas' only escapade together. That is, maybe, a missed opportunity. If the movie itself were as stimulating as the neighbors are to Pippa, we might become akin to accomplices in her gazing, her arousal, and her later fantasies of being in the neighboring apartment.

Some inventive possibilities come of this, such as Thomas' idea to use a laser pointer as a kind of microphone to actually listen in on the neighbors, the way the two sneak into the other apartment during a Halloween party to get that rig set up, and Pippa's use of a wireless printer to anonymously communicate with the woman, to whom she has come to feel some sympathy. That feeling comes after a rather conveniently coincidental meeting between the two women, when Julia (Natasha Liu Bordizzo), the neighbor, shows up in the optometrist office where Pippa works. Later, Julia tells Pippa about her husband Seb (Ben Hardy) and the challenges of being married to a genius artist with certain tendencies.

The stakes here are relatively low, until a series of turns and twists amplify the toll of Pippa's fascination and actions with some deadly consequences. It's difficult to accept some of her decisions later, considering how invested she emotionally becomes in Julia's well-being and fate. Without much at stake in the first and second acts, that just gives Mohan more time to establish the unconvincing relationship and rapport between Pippa and Thomas, as well as to offer a lot of unfounded arguments for Pippa as fundamentally "a good person." It's a stretch, albeit a necessary one for the filmmaker to try, in order for the increasingly ludicrous third act to possess any kind of grounding.

Here, "ludicrous" isn't necessarily intended as an insult. To be sure, for all of the gears and other mechanics of what happens in the third act to work, all of these characters have to become significantly dumber and abandon any sense of basic decency. It's the height—or, depending on one's perspective, the nadir—of the trashiness of The Voyeurs, which otherwise makes too much of an effort to convince us it's anything but trash.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products