The Cry of the Owl *** (2009, Paddy Considine, Julia Stiles, Karl Pruner) – Classic Movie Review 3550

Director Jamie Thraves also writes the screenplay of this intriguing 2009 thriller, adapting the novel by Patricia Highsmith that had already provided a most satisfying movie version in 1987 from masterly Claude Chabrol, The Cry of the Owl [Le cri du hibou].

Paddy Considine and Julia Stiles star, with Karl Pruner, Phillip MacKenzie, Gord Rand and James Gilbert also in the cast.

This version is not quite as good, though it is still intense, suspenseful and effective. In it, the troubled hero leaves the big city and his ex-wife for a small town, where he starts spying on and stalking a beautiful young woman who surprises him and invites him in. He is drawn into a relationship with her, but her jealous boyfriend goes missing.

Paddy Considine stars as Robert Forrester, a lonely newly-divorced man who enjoys watching a woman (Julia Stiles) he has never met from her front garden. She is Jenny Thierolf. After she catches him spying on her, she invites him in to her house rather than calling the police – then starts stalking him! And then her boyfriend disappears, leaving Robert as the suspect in a possible murder.

Despite the feeling that something has been lost on the way to the movies, this is still a satisfyingly twisty thriller, based on the 1962 novel by Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr Ripley, Strangers on a Train), with enough of the required tension, mixing with Highsmith’s patented unsettling feelings of danger and weirdness.

The direction may slightly lack impact and the acting may not be quite subtle enough to produce a really clever thriller, but it will do to be going on with.

It was filmed at Claremont, Ontario, Canada.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3550

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