Windfall review: A home-invasion thriller falls short

Three people are trapped in a house and so are you in Windfall (on Netflix Friday), an itchy, underdeveloped chamber piece whose sour tone aims for something between social satire and neo-noir thriller, but lands mostly on real estate porn.

Jason Segel is an anonymous and clearly amateur burglar just wrapping up a quickie job at a remote vacation home — he's already grabbed cash, a Rolex, and a little light refreshment, along with a Chekhovian gun from the bedside table — when the owners (Jesse Plemons and Lily Collins) abruptly show up. Instead of accepting their eager offer of whatever money and valuables are on hand, he decides to stay put for a bigger payout, kicking off an enforced bonding exercise in which cold peanut-butter sandwiches and much conversational oxygen will be consumed.

A good portion of that will be by Plemons, who also goes unnamed as a floridly smug tech mogul whose vast fortune stems from inventing some kind of algorithm that "trims the fat" (i.e. humans) from corporations; Emily in Paris star Lily Collins trails behind as his quieter, vaguely discomfited wife. Both seem remarkably casual about the man literally holding a gun to their heads, and Plemons' character particularly can't seem to stop needling Segel's, even on immediate threat of death; he's just too used to a world that exists solely to serve him, and this inconvenience does not compute.

With little to do but wait for an assistant to deliver the agreed-upon ransom, Mogul Man blithely holds forth on his general philosophy of life — Ayn Rand, one presumes, would heartily approve — as the long minutes tick by. Segel's would-be hustler, shaggy and glowering, looks increasingly like he'd rather be anywhere else; he's like a circus bear who would very much like to wipe the floor with the trainer who keeps yapping at him but stoically endures. Collins, on her screen husband's art-of-war instruction, makes a wan play to engage him, but each one of them is so assured of their own supreme victim status that they're hardly communicating so much as monologuing past one another.

At least they can enjoy the view: It's nearly impossible not to let your eyes wander to the sprawling grounds and Instagrammable decor of the immaculate Ojai compound the movie is shot at; nearly every painting on the wall looks like it could single-handedly pay down Segel's character's debts, if that's what he came for. Except he's as bad at criming — poor decision-making is a consistent hallmark of the script, by Justin Lader and Andrew Kevin Walker — as his captives are at acknowledging their powerlessness. And the entrance of a fourth player, an unsuspecting gardener (Omar Leyva), tips the fragile détente, though he too can't seem to stop doing things no rational person would, largely in the service of keeping the sputtering plot on track.

Director Charlie McDowell is probably best known for directing 2014's The One I Love, a clever, eerie little indie forged in a similar hothouse atmosphere. (He also happens to be Collins' real-life spouse.) Windfall (on Netflix this Friday) relies on that same kind of closeness to concentrate and accelerate its central conflicts, but its characters are such broadly underdeveloped archetypes, and their decisions are so generally confounding, that reality never really enters the equation. Its thoughts on class warfare and the complacent villainy of the one percent, too, don't feel particularly fresh or trenchant in the recent wake of far sharper takes by the likes of Parasite and HBO's White Lotus.

Segel earns some empathy as a hangdog Everyman, though his backstory remains such a deliberate blank that any insight is mostly gleaned from his blundering missteps and low-simmering misery. An improbable incident late in the third act finally brings real consequences, and the last ten minutes are grimly satisfying. But it doesn't bode well for storytelling that the setting often overwhelms the slackness of the narrative. For all the supposed stakes on screen, Windfall often feels less like a fully formed movie than the quick work of film crew who arrived to shoot one of those Architectural Digest videos about gorgeously appointed homes you can't afford, accidentally stumbled into a hostage situation, and decided to make the best of it. So what's left, mostly, is just to watch these unhappy people bicker and parry, and wish you had their pillows. Grade: C-

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