Open Windows 2014 | Searching 2018 | Video Review

Much like the Den, this movie flew under the radar. It stars Elijah Wood as a man who gains access to his fav through his computer.

The first scene is of a fantasy horror movie called Dark Sky and at first, I thought they had the wrong movie posted on Shudder so stopped it and found the movie again on Amazon Prime.

It’s free right now. Turns out that was just a trailer the main character was watching on their laptop while live streaming a Comic Con type event.

I forgot the main character’s name Nick, but he should be named Stan because that’s what he is, a Stan. He runs a site dedicated to the fictional actress Jill Goddard.

Anyway, Nick is contacted by a super Stan and given more access to the actress via different things like the actresses phone from the computer. That reminded me of when all those actresses iPhones got hacked and their nudes got leaked. I think it was known as The Fappening.

Together Nick and anonymous super stan stalk the actress together. I was a little annoyed at how the camera kept zooming in at the different windows on his computer, but then again the movie is called “Open Windows” and I got used to it after a while.
I think this is the only one of these movies that takes place on a PC laptop instead of a MacBook.

This movie is more voyeuristic than the others I have reviewed in this sub-genre.
He goes down a rabbit hole of fuckery at the direction of the super Stan, in which he eventually gets manipulated and blackmailed into doing some wild stuff.

At first I thought a major plot hole was that the super Stan tells Nick that he needs to keep anyone from seeing him, but he is viewable on all the security cameras in the hotel. But then it was later shown that super Stan has access to those cameras and can manipulate the footage, so that was explained away.

Remember how I said the super Stan was able to hack into her phone, he also turns on her webcam without her knowledge. Sound familiar? A lot of people have a fear if this happening.

You see them with paper taped over their webcam. I used to feel that way too. Then I though if someone did do that to me, what would they see? Me chewing gum and editing video.

There is one sequence that took me out of the moment. When super Stan tells Nick to send a file to the actress or else he will hurt her. He is talking to Nick while supposedly stalking the actress with a knife.

Nick should have asked him, “How are you talking to me without her hearing you if you are in the room with her?” That should have tipped him off that super Stan wasn’t just one guy, but some sort of organization.

Or is super Stan all in Nick’s head? An alternative ego he created in his mind.
You’ll just have to watch the movie to find out.

The acting was decent. Elijah Wood always does a good job. There is some violence, but no blood or gore.

The soundtrack was very cinematic. It was well orchestrated musically but it takes you out of the moment and makes this feel less found footage and more like a regular movie.

Another thing that takes us out of it is that the dash cam footage and the laptop footage looks like regular movie camera footage. These scenes would have been so much better if the director used an actual dash cam or even a cellphone.

They could have even adjusted the footage in post to make it appear as such. I edit my videos on iMovie or PowerDirector and even if I record my video in HD or 720p that novice software allows me to take that footage and downgrade it to 360p.

So, I imagine with professional editing software, even if they used regular movie cameras, they could edit it later to make it look like it was really webcam and dash cam.

I got sleepy watching the last third of this movie and I was watching it at 2:30pm. Until the reveal happened and I perked up a bit. It switches to super stan’s POV through his head mounted camera.

There were some pyrotechnics that looked impressive. I almost forgot to mention that.

For me this wasn’t as interesting as Searching or the Den, but it wasn’t bad either. If I paid to see this is a theater, I would be a bit let down. But, I watched it for free so my expectations were met.

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