Windfall Review: A Tragicomic Hostage Drama with No Sting in Its Tail

As cinematic criminals go, the one who starts the action rolling in Charlie McDowell’s tragicomic hostage drama Windfall takes an unusually lackadaisical approach to his work. Credited as Nobody (Jason Segel), he’s first spotted wandering around a luxurious, orange grove-shaded villa that clearly doesn’t belong to him. He soaks in the dusky California sun and imagines what it would be like to own the place. Suddenly, almost as though coming out of a dream, he snaps into action, taking what little cash is in the house and heading for the door. Then the owners show up. A few minutes later, Nobody has CEO (Jesse Plemons) and Wife (Lily Collins) at gunpoint. None of the three seem to know what to do next.

Justin Lader and Andrew Kevin Walker’s screenplay admirably avoids the usual diagrammatic steps for ratcheting up the pressure in a hostage film taking place in a limited setting (every scene here takes place inside the villa or on its grounds). There are relatively few big confrontation scenes, nearly no attempts at escape, and at no point is there a police negotiator outside barking through a megaphone that they understand just what Nobody is going through. Some of Windfall’s earlier parts are played almost for comedy. A scene where CEO and Wife make a break for it through the orange grove carries an odd slapstick vibe. When Nobody tackles CEO, he shouts, “I win! I got you!” like he was victorious in a game of tag.

Much of Windfall is relatively static. Mostly we watch the characters wait for the $500,000 that CEO has pressured his assistant into rushing to the house to pay off Nobody. The interpersonal dynamics, though, are more fluid. Almost right away, the cracks in the hostages’ marriage are brought to the surface. CEO is presented as an arrogant train wreck, a tech billionaire who cannot stop himself from lording his status over others. The hostage situation has barely begun when Wife, a former assistant who seems to be regretting the moral compromises that she’s made, begins making her discontent with their marriage clear.

Running in tandem with CEO and Wife’s sniping is the lopsided verbal class warfare raging between CEO and Nobody. While Wife tries to placate the man holding the gun, CEO appears determined to verbally beat down Nobody, who responds only half-heartedly. The normally placid Plemons brings an unusually fiery temperament to his performance. He renders CEO as a jittery mass of one-percenter insecurity, complaining about the difficulties of being “a rich white guy” in between rants about “free loaders and loafers” that sound like they were downloaded from whatever cloud server Peter Thiel’s consciousness resides in.

The absurdity of CEO’s cluelessness about the vulnerability of his situation is blackly comic at first, especially when played against Nobody’s quietly shambolic haplessness (a quality that fits quite well in Segel’s skill set). But Windfall otherwise has a difficult time landing on the right tone or getting a bead on its characters. The fighting between CEO and Wife erupts so suddenly and viciously that it’s hard to imagine them ever even pretending to get along. And while Nobody’s guardedness might be intentional, the reasoning behind it is hard to gauge.

When a fourth character is introduced late in the film and bloodily dispatched in an accident, the moment appears intended either as symbolic or comedic but registers merely as jarring and borderline cruel. From the characters not having names to them being scarcely shaded in, Windfall maintains a mysterious ambiguity that’s compelling—until it isn’t. That’s in part due to the hammering class critique, which takes up so much of the characters’ interactions and is so bluntly rendered that it has little impact. Similarly, the arbitrary and unearned nature of the film’s concluding spasm of violence saps it of any intended sting or satirical potency.