Windfall Review: Netflix’s School Thriller Puts Mark Zuckerberg on Trial

There are three characters in Falling windand none of them have names: a wealthy tech CEO played by Jesse Plemons (The power of the dog), his wife, played by Lily Collins (Emily in Paris), and the man who stole them, played by Jason Segel (The puppets). They shouldn’t have met – at the beginning of the film, the thief is alone in the couple’s empty mansion. It is only when the couple changes plans and goes to find him in their home that the drama’s intense 90-minute negotiation begins. In the one-act play that follows, the hostage isn’t actually a person, it’s the idea of ​​a dictatorship, like Falling wind slowly turned into a classy thriller about the incarceration of world prisoners Mark Zuckerbergs.

The latest film from director Charlie McDowell (My love), now streaming on Netflix, is a return to the Hitchcockian, an exercise in filmmaking whose limitations, clarity, and tension arise when you put three people and a gun in the same room. together. Each character appears on screen and reveals a little bit about themselves, even though they try not to. The more time they spend together, the more they reveal, even if it hurts them. They can’t help but be themselves.

Shot with wide and long shots, Falling wind It feels like a play, though it doesn’t take away from the joy of cinema. Its only suite – the mansion and the orange garden around it – is lovingly depicted with its symmetrical compositions and gold-tinged colors. The film’s score is full of humorous logs that transport listeners through the heights and valleys as the dynamic shifts between the trio, whose performances just large enough to take them firmly out of the “subtle” range, but not so much that they become fully animated.

Photo: Netflix

Plemons is a joy to be the “CEO,” someone who, for most of the movie, can’t believe he’s being robbed. He suspects that he has somehow fallen victim to an intruder, whose full motives are never fully revealed – that his livelihood has somehow been compromised by the successes of the CEO’s companies, or that he is angry at the CEO’s stature and considers it a no-brainer. That trust manifests itself as complacency towards the guy holding him hostage: In a scene where the couple’s unexpected guest demands money, the executive laughs and says he should love. double demand.

A lot of Falling wind consists of the male leads talking over and over about what they want and whether or not the other is worthy of getting his or her wishes. In that sense, the CEO becomes the avatar of a new class of tech billionaires, believing he has earned his place and indeed faces considerable adversity, as the world eagerly awaits. waiting for someone like him to fall. The thief, faced with the smallness of the quarry, takes comfort in the belief that his understanding of man is still superior, no matter how desperate his circumstances. As the thief, Segel is a distinct hit: sly and sly, displaying a hint of malice rarely seen in his acting work. And in balance is the wife: the film’s quiet fulcrum, whose empathy changes and fluctuates depending on who really listens to her and who doesn’t.

Falling windThe screenplay by Justin Lader and Andrew Kevin Walker (from a story by Lader, Walker, Segel, and McDowell), wasn’t sophisticated enough to make the film a success. Its commentary is too heavy-handed, its characters too neatly outlined. But the script allows all three characters to become satisfactorily messy, as each of them overcomes minor lines of dialogue that surprise the others, in a series of violations that pile up until the three at the end of the movie is completely different from the three people at the beginning. . That’s the danger of so-called reward schemes: They are often built on lies that are rewarded with money. Keep those lies in mind, and the real person underneath begins to look a lot less special than before.

Falling wind Now available to stream on Netflix.