Most years are kind to Naomi Watts, and 2019 is no real exception. The actress has been in the hit Sundance film “Luce,” and she was cast as the lead in one of HBO’s “Game Of Thrones” spin-offs, although you won’t see that one until 2020 at the earliest. But she’s also been in one more 2019 Sundance film that has gone a little bit more under the radar. In “The Wolf Hour,” which still doesn’t seem to have U.S. distribution, Watts plays an agoraphobic shut-in in 1970s New York during the summer of Son of Sam that terrorized the five boroughs in 1977.
‘The Wolf Hour’: Naomi Watts Gives A Striking Raw Nerve Performance [Sundance Review]
That backdrop, a hot and sweltering summer in New York during a blackout with a serial killer on the loose (David Berkowitz), is the setting for “The Wolf Hour” and a psychological thriller and drama where a woman (Watts) is having something of a mental breakdown during this duress and anxiety that panicked an entire city.
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Written and directed by Alistair Banks Griffin, on top of Naomi Watts, “Wolf Hour” stars Emory Cohen, Jennifer Ehle, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Jeremy Bobb, and Brennan Brown. But it appears to be more of a one-woman Hitchcockian thriller in a single-setting: inside a dank, musty apartment.
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Here’s the official synopsis from Sundance:
It’s July 1977, and New York City is awash with escalating violence. A citywide blackout is triggering fires, looting, and countless arrests, and the Son of Sam murders are riddling the city with panic. June, once a celebrated counterculture figure, attempts to retreat from the chaos by shutting herself inside the yellowed walls of her grandmother’s South Bronx apartment. But her doorbell is ringing incessantly, the heat is unbearable, and creeping paranoia and fear are taking hold. Visitors, some invited, some unsolicited, arrive one by one, and June must determine whom she can trust and whether she can find a path back to her former self.
Indie superstar composers Saunder Jurriaans and Danny Bensi wrote the score, and they’re terrific in making a sonic backdrop to paranoia and the mind on the brink of collapse, so this one still sounds very intriguing. “Wolf Hour” has no U.S. release date yet, but a trailer has arrived for the film from international channels so it must be coming overseas soon which bodes well. Watch the first trailer below.