The Wolf Hour

Watts is left to do the heavy lifting as she has done so often, bringing her character shimmering into life, as real as if you were there in that sweatbox apartment with her - even this far from Mulholland Drive.

The Wolf Hour begins to feel strangely like an allegory for the paranoid fears of white women in a world of scary Black men.

Like the sheltered loner at its center, The Wolf Hour feels jailed amongst a string of half-realized ideas, too intimidated to step outside and tackle them head-on.

This movie is mostly just mood-setting, with much more going on in the background than the foreground.

[Watts] deserves an A for effort in a vehicle that rates a D for dreary, desolate and depressing. The rest of The Wolf Hour deserves an F for forget it.

A sometimes punishingly theatrical experiment that teeters on the verge of surreality, transfixing us with the promise of something terrible lurking just beyond those ratty curtains.

This is sort of like Repulsion with zero thrills or sick laughs, a glum ’70s reconstruction rendered in a decidedly contemporary way that doesn’t illuminate then or now.

It draws out an exceptional performance from Watts as she sweats, shudders and strives to sustain the film for its full duration by herself...But the film really inspires more yawns than scares.

Claustrophobic thriller goes nowhere despite sense of peril.

There is always the promise of something else lurking behind that closed doors, but it's too abstract to keep audience attention. Any intrigue set up in the first half of the film is soon wasted with unused plots and squandered performances.