Elijah Wood and Sasha Grey play a fan and a star in the voyeuristic new film Open Windows. Thanks to Celebgate, it feels especially relevant.
Sasha Grey in Open Windows
Cinedigm
Months before the giant celebrity phone hack and subsequent photo leak this past summer, filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo wrote and shot Open Windows, his new cyberstalking thriller opening in limited release on Nov. 7. So, it's partly a coincidence that the movie feels so relevant, and partly due to the undeniable fact that the lives of the rich and famous have always been considered public property by those who follow them. The digital age has just made boundaries easier to cross, and all from the anonymous comfort of your computer screen.
Open Windows is a film that's clever, then convoluted to a fault, but its core idea feels like a dead-on assessment of contemporary celebrity culture, in which being a fan of someone can come with a sense of ownership, and liking or lusting after a celebrity and wanting to devour or destroy them can be two sides of the same coin. Loving an actor or musician or model is the ultimate uneven relationship, after all — one in which all of the attention goes in one direction, with access doled out in scheduled appearances, tweets, Reddit AMAs, and interviews.
It's not hard to imagine resentment lurking, and it doesn't require a gross exaggeration to imagine that type of relationship becoming something darker. The creepiest parts of Open Windows have nothing to do with the extremes it eventually reaches. It's actually the slow slippage of a benign fan into someone more ominous that sticks with you after the rest of the story has plot twisted its way to oblivion.
Elijah Wood in Open Windows
Cinedigm
It wasn't, after all, just A-list nudity that made Celebgate such an event; it was the idea of the photos being stolen — that their subjects never intended or wanted the wider world to see them. It was the assaultive quality of the images that made them so popular. They weren't willingly put out there — this was a breach of the control these women, mostly, have over their availability and exposure. And to look at the photos cost nothing, aside from an ethical squirm — the celebrities weren't able to accusingly gaze back.
Open Windows focuses on actor Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey), who's been starring in a superpower franchise called Dark Sky. After a clip of her in action, we see her at a Comic Con-like event in Austin, where she, her co-star, the director, and producers take questions from the crowd, while Nick Chambers (Elijah Wood) streams the live footage from his laptop. Jill's not great at being the gracious actor — her smile keeps slipping, she needles a fan in a way that's not quite playful, and she handles a question about a sex tape rumor with obvious anger. Maybe she deserves what's coming, the film invites you to think, for not being grateful and patient enough, for not feeling entirely lucky to have a place in the spotlight.
It's an ugly thought, and it's one that seems enter the head of the puppyish Nick, who runs a website called JillGoddard-Caught.com, and faithfully takes screengrabs of her from the panel to upload. Nick thinks he's won a contest to have dinner with Jill, but not long after we see him nervously record a video introduction, he's called by someone named Chord (Neil Maskell) who tells him he works for the film company, and that Jill's canceled the dinner. Then, as if just playing around himself, he gives Nick access to the security feed from above the Austin event stage, offering a convenient view down Jill's shirt. Then, Chord offers Nick the key to Jill's phone — photos, contacts, calls, and the camera.
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