Charlie McDowell’s 2022 film Windfall is an intense and underrated thriller that succeeds by keeping its focus tight on its three leads: a tech mogul and CEO (Jesse Plemons), his reluctant wife (Lily Collins), and the burglar known only as Nobody (Jason Segel) who has invaded their home. While it was one of many early 2020s films to feel some of the constraints of the COVID-19 pandemic, given the confined nature of its story and cast, it uses that extreme focus to work in multiple modes. At once a domestic chamber drama about a failing marriage and a home invasion thriller, it also gets excellent work out of its cast, all of whom are playing against type.
The movie also taps into extreme 2020s anxieties around the value of the individual in the wake of the almighty algorithm, which is very significant to the plot. Plemons’ CEO is behind a tech company that made its fortune with an algorithm that can deduce redundancy in the workplace, effectively cutting jobs in the name of efficiency. Whether Jason Segel’s character was a victim of that with a righteous urge for vengeance or just a burglar hoping for half a million dollars is slowly unveiled over the course of the movie, but as a dramatic antagonist turn it’s a far cry from what you would expect of the star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and 2011’s The Muppets.
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‘Windfall’ Is a Thriller With a Social Conscience
Windfall might be a home invasion movie in which a couple is held at gunpoint by a madman, but it’s not operating in the wheelhouse of movies like the Brady Corbet-starring English remake of Funny Games or Panic Room. Instead, it uses the genre standards of the home invasion thriller to explore relationships and contemporary stresses. The burglary itself is just an externalization of those anxieties, a pressure cooker by which it can all rise to the forefront. Shot on a vast estate in Ojai, California (the CEO is, of course, extremely wealthy), the movie has a sprawling, wide-open feel that also cuts at the traditional genre thrills in favor of social commentary. By emphasizing (and, while director Charlie McDowell sought not to guide the viewer’s emotions, somewhat empathizing with) the villain’s desire, Windfall is able to explore ethical issues around the ethics of wealth and the corrosive effects it can have on the soul — and relationships.
Lily Collins’ character, for instance, is having issues with her CEO husband, which are only exacerbated by the threat of the burglar. While the movie is formally minimalist, with few hints outside the plot as to the characters’ histories, we do know that he wants kids and she doesn’t. For her, having kids might just tie her even tighter to her cold, rational husband. The callousness suggested by the app from which he made his fortune extends to other things in his orbit as well, from the well-being of their gardener (whom he tasks with solving the mess they’re in with a simple “Call 9-1-1” message) to whether he sees his wife as an actual human being or not. While the burglar is the antagonist of the movie in a very direct way, his own moral forthrightness next to the CEO’s cold pursuit of wealth makes the movie much more dynamic than it would be otherwise. And the burglar’s honesty in luxuriating in the pleasures of the ultra-rich complicates matters further.
‘Windfall’ Cast Its Leads Against Type
Jesse Plemons is one of the greatest actors of his generation, with a laconic Texan drawl has been used to incredible effect in movies from Killers of the Flower Moon to Game Night (which used it entirely for comedic effect). While he can often create a certain sympathy for many of his characters, the CEO of Windfall is far from that, with his callous disregard for his wife and gardener making him Plemons’ most unredeemed character this side of Breaking Bad. Lily Collins found new dimensions too in the Wife character, whose intelligence and moral uncertainty belie her every move. And as Nobody, Jason Segel was forced to do away with the good-natured awkwardness of his best-known film roles (even as David Foster Wallace in End of the Tour) to develop a character who strikes fear into viewers’ hearts as well as a kind of cynical understanding.
Windfall’s strength comes not from operating in the social thriller genre but in setting its three leads against each other, giving viewers a mysterious and threatening situation while also slowly unearthing the tension they feel with one another. Many of the movie’s best scenes involve the burglar and the wife speaking plainly, both showing tremendous honesty with each other despite their dangerous situation, in which he becomes a confidant of sorts. That she can reveal things to him that her husband can never know, and that the burglar can essentially shake them off as “rich people problems,” speaks to the movie’s complexity and willingness to avoid easy resolution. Even before its bloody ending, you have a feeling where it’s heading.