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 and now available on VOD. 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.
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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"You like stuff like that, but it's kind of a tease," Chord tells Nick at one point, talking about the chaste photos of Jill littering his site, while goading him to go further, prodding him for anything less PG. Eventually, Nick gets pulled into a whole complicated, ludicrous scenario involving hackers with near-magical abilities, secret servers, and multiple betrayals, and the movie falls apart. But before then, there's a resonant shift into the increasingly inappropriate, from which Nick doesn't pull away, and in which he's therefore complicit.
It's no accident that lovable hobbit Wood — who's played baddies before but who retains a baby-faced aura of boyishness about him — was cast as Nick. It's an even more provocative choice that Grey, a former adult performer, plays Jill (though her limitations as an actor show in her more dramatic later scenes). Porn actors seem more vulnerable to admirers feeling entitled to overstep their boundaries than non-porn ones, having to contend with expectations that not only their lives but their bodies have been made available to their audience.
There's an awareness of Grey's past that clings to her. She's playing a studio darling who may be subject to more intense public scrutiny than the actor herself is, but Jill is also sheltered by a barrier of agents and producers. Jill struggles to preserve an image that's more mainstream than Grey's own, but Open Windows compellingly portrays the ways in which some people still want to peer at her most intimate and exposed moments — and given the opportunity, they'd do so without her consent, while still describing themselves as fans. The movie may not be very convincing at showing how someone might want to get out of the business, but it's frighteningly good at depicting how exhausting it can be to stay in it.