116 min | R | September 10, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A young couple moves into a Montreal loft and finds they can see straight into the apartment across the street. They start watching the strangers there have sex, fight, and unravel, and they cannot make themselves stop. The film wants to be Rear Window and ends up peeping at itself.
Pippa and Thomas move into a cavernous Montreal loft with a wall of windows. Across the street, another couple lives behind glass that hides nothing. Pippa starts watching. Seb and Julia have sex, argue, and run an affair in plain sight, and Pippa cannot look away. The film presents itself as an erotic thriller about surveillance and desire. It is really about the lie that watching costs the watcher nothing.
Sydney Sweeney plays Pippa as a woman whose curiosity hardens into compulsion. She registers every escalation in her face before she says a word. Justice Smith plays Thomas with a nervous decency that curdles as the obsession spreads to him. The two share a real ease in the early scenes, and the film coasts on it. Ben Hardy plays Seb as a man who performs intimacy for an audience he knows is there. Natasha Liu Bordizzo plays Julia as the woman caught between them, and the script gives her less to do than the watching demands.
Michael Mohan writes and directs, and he shoots the film like a perfume ad. The loft glows in magenta and teal, and the camera favors long lenses that flatten the distance between the two apartments into a single plane of glass. The production design turns both homes into vitrines, all hard surfaces and clean sightlines. Mohan stages the voyeurism with care, using reflections and laser pointers and a telescope to make looking feel mechanical and deliberate. The craft is confident. The script keeps piling twist on twist until the final act collapses under the weight of its own reversals.
The Voyeurs borrows its bones from Rear Window and Body Double and never escapes the comparison. The first hour works as a study of obsession and the people who feed it. Then the plot mechanics take over, and the film trades its ideas for a string of gotchas that explain everything and mean nothing. Mohan has the eye for this genre and not yet the discipline to trust a simple story. The result watches better than it thinks.