I wish I could have watched Amazon Studios’ The Voyeurs in the theater instead of at home on our 19” Emerson. Not because this so-called erotic thriller deserves the big-screen treatment; by now, we’ve all become accustomed to seeing tits on small screens. More it was so I could turn to the strangers around me and go, “Are you seeing this shit? Who let this happen? Are you going to finish that popcorn?”
The Voyeurs is so fucking awful that it makes me question every other one finger review I’ve ever given. Except Alone in the Dark. Nothing is more absolute than the shittiness of Alone in the Dark. But this Amazon movie is a train wreck, a head-on collision between two locomotives packed with horse shit and body parts.
The Voyeurs wants to be an erotic thriller in the tradition of 90s movies starring Shannon Tweed. I know, dream big, right? But it fails bigger. To even hurdle the low bar of Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure, it would need more logic, purpose and likability, and fewer soft-boiled eggs. Eggs and erotica never mix! Not even in the Candy Bottom’s holiday treasure, The Easter Miracle: Risen and Hard.
The Voyeurs tells the story of a young, dumb and full of even more dumb couple (Pippa – Sydney Sweeney and Thomas – Justice Smith) who move into a new apartment and start watching the sexy neighbors (Sebastian – Ben Hardy and Julia – Natasha Liu Bordizzo) humping in the luxury flat with huge windows across the road. They know it’s wrong, but they can’t stop. They buy binoculars and set up a long-range microphone so they can not only see the thrusts but hear the grunts. Also, they get a birdfeeder.
Everything is not what it seems, though. While his wife is away, photographer Sebastian humps every model who comes through his apartment studio. They all seem to fall for his strategy of taking off his shirt while shooting them, so they then take off theirs. His next go to move is to eat them out. Even the girl who says no gives in as soon as he tongues her like a kid with a state fair waffle cone.
Purely by coincidence, of course, Julia becomes a client and then a friend and confidant of Pippa’s. Pippa is obsessed with her sexy neighbors, but because of this new friendship, feels compelled to anonymously reveal Sebastian’s cheating by somehow hacking a wireless printer and sending printed messages to Julia. I guess she didn’t have her fax number.
Upon learning of the infidelity, Julia kills herself. In the movie, this is because she is distraught about her husband’s actions and not what this fucking turd of a movie will do to her career. After seeing the dead, bloody woman across the way, Thomas blames Pippa and storms out.
Pippa, obviously broken up over the loss of her boyfriend and her complicity in a suicide, wants to fuck Sebastian. To be fair, they are both single now. Who cares if his wife’s body is still warm?
The Sebastian-Pippa fuckfest is a payoff. While the movie shows lots of tits, it’s intentionally coy about Sweeney’s, like a slot car set you want most of all but worry you won’t get for Christmas because your parents saveit for last. Or, your employer teasing you with the dream of maybe wearing jeans to work on Friday if everyone hits their sales targets, week after week. The Voyeurs gives us sideboob and shy glances of Sweeney’s fine shape, but writer/director/auteur Michel Mohan creates artificial scarcity of her jugs so he can finallly serve them to us like a free scoop of vanilla ice cream included for the price of dinner. Once those titties are out, they’re as on-display as an eight-year girl who just learned how to do cartwheels.
While Pippa parades her nips, Thomas comes home to forgive her for being an awful person. Of course, he spies her across the way, fucking the guy who cheated on his girlfriend, the guy she was spying on while jacking him off. Naturally, he reacts by hanging himself. Yes, two suicides, in 15 minutes. Not even Faces of Death went there.
Julia feels a little bad, but only for a moment. It’s hard to tell because this movie does not deal in the realm of human emotion or rational thought. Luckily, she cheers up after talking it over with her sassy coworker (Katharine King So), who doles out wisdom like, “You can’t blame yourself because two people killed themselves directly as a result of your actions,” and, “It makes total sense for you to fuck the creepy serial philanderer who hurt your friend immediately after her death because you’re on the rebound.”
It’s impossible to know whether The Voyeurs or Michael Mohan believes the bullshit the characters say, but given its total lack of morals or ethics, I assume so. I mean, this movie has absolutely no grasp on right or wrong, no sense of goodness or justice motivating any character. The story is just “this happened, and then this happened, and then this, followed by– surprise–something else you didn’t expect because you have a brain and logic.” The connective tissue between cause and effect is weaker than in a senior citizen with lupus.
After quickly recovering from Thomas’s death, Pippa attends Sebastian’s big new photo exhibition (he’s sort of a big deal–perhaps the best photographer in the world who only takes pictures of topless women in his apartment). Are you ready for the twist? Can you handle this? I’m warning you: you may be so shocked your bowels let loose and you’ll finish reading this review in a stew of your own dietary mistakes.
Okay, I warned you! Julia isn’t dead! She and Sebastian faked her suicide as part of an art piece. Pippa and Thomas had been set up, and had been watched while watching the entire time. The level of predictive skills of Julia and Sebastian, to know they’d be watched, to know they’d get a microphone embedded in their apartment, to know Pippa would warn Julia about Sebastian’s cheating, to know Thomas would be mad, is simply staggering. So staggering it could almost be confused for really fucking lazy writing.
Anyway, the new art exhibit is photos of Pippa’s tits, her dead boyfriend swinging from a rope, and the two of them spying. And it’s a huge hit in the art world, with nobody feeling grossed out or slimy by association, and nobody wondering what the point is.
Are we supposed to feel bad for Pippa? She is still an awful person. Everyone is. Awful and mean, no matter how nice the tits. Like a Russian strip club. We’re just along for the ride, observers with no emotional investment because the movie thinks irrational twists and pompous dialog, not relatable characters, are what make a story.
The result is that the next and final twist is as unrewarding and fucking stupid as the last. It turns out, Thomas didn’t hang himself. Julia and Sebastian drugged and hung him, all to make their art project even more powerful (and gross and illegal and hypocritical). What the fuck??? What is the message here? Tits and good lighting? Because that’s all this movie has going for it.
Pippa figures out Julia and Sebastian’s plot, and as an act of revenge for them displaying her tits on a gallery wall, she lures them to her optometry studio where she burns out their eyes with lasers. The movie’s final shots are of the blind couple in their apartment, stumbling around, unaware if anyone is watching. Oh, powerful stuff! Let that be a lesson to anyone planning on exploiting an optometrist with a voyeuristic kink.
I think Mohan, in his arrogant, myopic way believes he is creating redemption, or some satisfaction from his stupid fucking twists. He doesn’t. Even those bad Skinemax movies of the 90s had at least some moral to them. They usually tried to deliver comeuppance to the villain, no matter how shallow that was. All The Voyeurs can manage is terrible things done by terrible people for God knows why.
And the people are terrible. The actors, especially, Thomas and Sweeney, have the sophistication of third graders. In fact, Sweeney looks more like she should be playing a high-school virgin in a slasher flick than a sex-obsessed ophthalmologist. Thomas mumbles his way through the movie. It’s hard to understand what he’s saying, which may be a blessing. Like, while watching their neighbors fuck, he mumbles to Pippa, “Oh, kissy kissy,” to show he understands what they’re seeing. The potentially hottest scene in the movie is when Pippa starts playing with him while they watch the show across the street, and then orders him to get behind her, so she can be fucked while watching. But instead of sexy, the mood is shattered as Thomas flounders around with bewilderment, mumbling, “What? What are you doing? Why are you doing that?” Jesus Fucking Christ, dude. This is your girlfriend, and you live together. You don’t know how sex works?
The dialog is just so fucking bad. Mohan is probably proud of his speeches, but they come off sounding like an incel berating a camgirl after he read part of an Ayn Rand novel. The attempts at humor can be summed up by a scene where one 20-something girl tells another that a pair of glasses make her look like a “femme fatale” who would “Bang Doogie Howser and then slit his throat.” Pretty sure that’s not how femme fatales work. Plus, is Doogie Howser something 20-somethings reference a lot? Has this script been sitting on a shelf for thirty years? Or is Doogie Howser Mohan’s point of reference for innocence? If so, it explains a lot.
The Voyeurs takes place in Montreal. I don’t know why since the location is not a feature. Neither do I know why one character has an Australian accent, one a Cockney, most American, and a few French. It’s just another thing that somebody thought of putting in this movie but without knowing why.
Similarly, the movie tries to bombard us with “eyes” but fails say anything more about them than the movie’s generic title. Pippa is an ophthalmologist (and optometrist and optician who helps in laser surgeries, does eye exams, helps people pick out their frames, and then calls them to let them know their glasses are ready). All from what can only be described as the swankiest eye doctor office in the world. Sebastian is a photographer. There are glasses and binoculars, and also many, many closeups of corneas and retinas (and cut-open soft-boiled eggs, which, apparently look like eyes). There are watchers, and watchers watching the watchers. None of this enriches the story. Rather, it mostly seems like a last-minute collage by a high school AP English student who googled for images of eyes.
And now for my totally unexpected twist. I’m giving The Voyeurs One Finger which I wish I could jab in Mohan’s eyes. I guess this proves the old saying: Tits, good lighting and comprehensible story. Pick two, because you can never have all three. Amazon chose badly.