The last time I saw Naomi Watts on screen, she was suffering through a blizzard on top of a mountain in Infinite Storm. Now I get to watch her jog miles on a hurt leg while emotionally suffering over the possibility of losing her son. Naomi Watts: really trying to win an Oscar by sheer force of misery. And I think she earns it.

The Desperate Hour is about a mother out for a jog in the woods when she gets notified of a shooting at her son’s high school. For the next real-time hour, she runs as fast as she can to get out of these damn woods, trying to stay in touch with various people on her cell phone.

This feels a lot like an experiment in real-time film-making… to see if one actress and disembodied voices on the phone are enough to sustain a relatively short film’s runtime. And it mostly does. Though, honestly once I realized our ticking clock was going to involve an isolated woman in the woods for a solid hour, I got nervous. I wasn’t convinced they could sustain the drama and the suspense.

They largely did… but the film did feel uneven some of the time and I wasn’t convinced of the more Hollywood thriller ending.

But enough of it works and enough of it is wildly suspenseful and enough of it is carried by Naomi Watts’ sheer force of will. It’s a good film, even if maybe it stretched patience at times.

Score: 84