The Cry of the Owl

Based on the book by Patricia Highsmith, The Cry of the Owl follows Christophe Malavoy’s Robert as he spends his free time peeping into the home of a fetching young woman (Mathilda May’s Juliette) – with Juliette’s inevitable discovery of Robert’s presence kicking into motion a decidedly unusual friendship. It’s hard to pin the blame of The Cry of the Owl‘s abject failure entirely on filmmaker Claude Chabrol, as the director, working from a script co-written with Odile Barski, replicates many of the beats and plot developments contained within Highsmith’s hopelessly ineffective novel. The problem here, then, is the presence of an inherently faulty premise that’s simply not workable, with the initial encounter between Robert and Juliette straining credibility right to its breaking point and establishing an atmosphere of eye-rolling implausibility that persists right through to the film’s anticlimactic finale. Chabrol’s decision to infuse the proceedings with a lamentably deliberate pace exacerbates its various problems, and it’s also worth noting that even the performances manage to leave the viewer cold – as the various actors tackle their respective characters with an almost astonishing lack of subtlety. The end result is a terrible, consistently unwatchable piece of work that’s about as wrongheaded as they come, which effectively forces the viewer to wonder just what Chabrol saw in the laughably irrelevant source material.

* out of ****