The Cry of the Owl *** (2009, Paddy Considine, Julia Stiles, Karl Pruner, James Gilbert, Caroline Dhavernas) – Classic Movie Review 12,235

Director Jamie Thraves’s 2009 psychological crime thriller film The Cry of the Owl is a really rather satisfactory English language remake of Claude Chabrol’s 1987 French film Le Crie du Hibou, adapting Patricia Highsmith’s 1962 novel.

Paddy Considine stars as unbalanced stalker Robert Forrester, who is spying on young Jenny Thierolf (Julia Stiles), apparently living happily at her countryside home. Big mistake! She is neither happy nor very sane, and soon she is stalking him! The disappearance of Jenny’s angry fiancé Greg (James Gilbert) after a fight with Robert leads to a dark trail of violence and murder. Robert gets a divorce from his unhinged, vindictive wife Nickie (Caroline Dhavernas), who has an agenda of her own, and Jenny goes to visit her.

The Cry of the Owl is the eighth of Patricia Highsmith’s 22 novels. She considered it, wrongly, to be one of her weaker books, but perhaps correctly calling its principal character ‘rather square, a polite sitting duck for more evil characters, and a passive bore.’

It is indeed a difficult character to play, but Considine plays him well, credibly and sympathetically, though just as Highsmith has written him, rather square and passive till roused to anger and rage, and then still polite. That’s a tall order to pull off, but Considine does, a bit too twitchy at first, then settling in nicely to be a convincing weird oddball, so typical of Highsmith. Though he looks very English, he does give himself a bit of an American makeover. Stiles has the measure of her character too, she seem just right for the role, haunted by some demons, and death obsessed. The film is all about death too. It’s not really very cheery at all. It is very dismal.

The film to its credit doesn’t bottle out from Highsmith’s shockingly grim view of the world. Thraves keeps it nice and bleak and dark, and ends with a bit of a bloodbath. Like the book, the film paces up and builds mounting suspense and plot dynamism as it goes along increasingly satisfyingly, to its crazy conclusion. Although Thraves hails from music videos, it is greatly to his credit that he does not try to make the film flashy looking, though he does bring a cool style to it, locating it nicely.

The Cry of the Owl settles in France easily and effortlessly for the Chabrol film, but here set in America, it’s OK too, though with a bit more effort though maybe. However, it was shot in Ontario, Canada, between October and December 2007.

It was released in the UK on April 19, 2010 and in the US on June 8, 2010. The American-British-Canadian-French-German co-production is produced BBC Films and distributed by Myriad Pictures. It had a very limited cinema release, premiering on DVD and Blu-ray in most countries, other than UK, US, Canada and France.

Highsmith drew on her own experience as a stalker as years before, when employed by a New York City store, she became obsessed with a woman she had served. The setting for the book is similar to the area where Highsmith was living in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Jenny’s considers the owl a harbinger of death and believes that Robert’s appearance foretells a death, like years before an unknown man appeared in her family’s house before her younger brother’s death.

Highsmith ended her relationship with her partner Marijane Meaker as she was starting the novel in April 1961. Meaker told an interviewer that Highsmith modelled the character of Nickie after her as an act of ‘retaliation’.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,235

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com