The Wolf Hour  ★★½

The year 2013 was a bad one for Naomi Watts.

She appeared in Diana, Adore and Movie 43, three of the worst films in living memory.

This goes to show that she has always struggled with her choice of roles.

She is a talent, sometimes captivating, actress and has done some good work, but she never seems to land that one great role and nail the performance at the same time.

The Wolf Hour (2019) is another good example. Watts is onscreen for the entire time and is believable as a former counter-culture and feminist writer who has been in self-imposed exile.

But the film itself is ponderously slow and doesn’t truly get beneath the skin of the character in the way that Watts’performance suggests it is doing.

It’s set in her South Bronx apartment in 1977 during the so-called Summer of Sam when serial killer Sam Berkowitz had the entire city on edge with his murder spree.

The city’s sense of dread and anxiety is meant to reflect the mental shackles that are also preventing Watts’character from moving on with her life, leaving her apartment from time to time and finishing the novel that her publisher has been patiently waiting years for her to complete.

While the film creates a strong sense of place, the metaphor is too often either heavy-handed or misses the mark and we are left with a shell of a film that doesn’t deliver on its promise.