The Desperate Hour movie review (2022) | Roger Ebert

Once in a while, you see a film where it's clear that everyone involved is operating at the peak of of their skills, yet the whole is so misguided that the result is still awful. Such is "The Desperate Hour."Naomi Watts is Amy Carr,a mom who goes out for a morning jog in the forest just as a school shooting happens in her rural town, and must struggle to find her way out of the forest, overcoming injuries while juggling multiple incoming phone calls and texts in hopes of figuring out whether her elementary-school age daughter Emily (Sierra Maltby)and teenaged son Noah (Colton Gobbo)are safe. Directed by the great Australian director Philip Noyce ("Dead Calm," "The Quiet American") and written by Chris Sparling ("Sea of Trees,""Buried"), "The Desperate Hour" seems to think it has something urgent and deep to say about the American phenomenon of mass gun murders being committed in public settings pretty much continuously.This is far from the first piece of filmed or written media to use...