It’s amusing to think that two really good things came out of the brief marriage between Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen. First, there was Time After Time, which is an absolutely amazing little time travel thriller directed by Nicholas Meyer, and is also where the pair met (seriously, check that movie out, if for nothing else than McDowell’s delightful performance as H.G. Wells, who, after coming to the future from Victorian England in his very own time machine, delights at being served French Fries in a Bay Area McDonald’s). The second is their son, Charlie McDowell, director of the really swell The One I Love and the pretty mediocre The Discovery, who has returned with a Netflix original titled Windfall, which sees him re-teaming with Jason Segal in a totally different context: This fucker’s a thriller, y’all. The streamer dropped a trailer for the film earlier on Tuesday, and it’ll provide you a jolt to get you through those post-lunch blues.
Take a look:
Here’s a typical Netflix synopsis, which, as we pointed out to you last week, is concise almost to the point of insanity:“A Hitchcockian thriller following a young couple (Lily Collins, Jesse Plemons) who arrive at their vacation home only to find it’s being robbed.”
Windfall arrives on Netflix on March 18, which is when we’ll find out if the “Hitchcockian” label is a curse for projects on the streamer or not. After all, it’s been pretty rough going for them in the last few years — just remember The Woman in the Window (which we were in the minority on, given that it was pretty passable) or Rebecca (which, well, it was hard not to be in the majority on, just because of how poor that film was) — but maybe this is the kind of lane that works best for the projects they make that appropriate that adjective in their marketing. All we know is that Hitch would have pulled out the bleach and made Lily Collins go platinum blonde, but we’re aware that times have changed.