Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Voyeurs’ on Amazon Prime, an Erotic Thriller Starring Sydney Sweeney as a Peeping Jane

Here’s Amazon Prime’s The Voyeurs, all acting like we need another riff on Rear Window, like we all didn’t just suffer through The Woman in the Window. Except this time, it’s aimed at 23-year-olds, thanks to stars Sydney Sweeney and Ben Hardy. Oh, and it’s extra spicy, like a Skinemax thriller from 1989. So let’s take inventory: Silent Generation concept, Gen-X sex, Gen-Z and Millennial stars — which, if my mathiness is correct, adds up to another Up Yours to the Boomers. Nice! But that’s just how the movie looks on paper; let’s see how it is in execution.

THE VOYEURS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Pippa (Sweeney) is in a lingerie shop in Montreal, so it’s probably technically a “shoppe.” She’s trying on something peekabooey when she notices the camera peering through the curtain, so she snaps it shut. Don’t get used to the fourth wall being broken, because it only happens once. Pippa has a big grin on her face as she heads back to the apartment she just moved into with her boyfriend Thomas (Justice Smith). They’re so very much in love, they probably don’t even worry about how to afford this spacious loft, since he writes music for commercials and she’s an optometrist. They’re super cute, even when they look at the apartment across the street and kind of can’t look away as its occupants take their tops and bottoms and unders off and do oral and inter. Perhaps these people should invest in some shades, maybe even 50 of them.

After witnessing some kinky shenanigans, Pippa emerges from the bathroom in her new hello-there skivvies and finds Thomas passed right the eff out. So much for THAT. The two young lovetwits soon learn that the fella across the way (Hardy) is a photographer who — wait, is he choking? He’s choking! Coincidentally while they’re staring at him! And his wife (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) doesn’t know it! Should Pippa and Thomas call 911 and reveal themselves as creeps? No! Yes? No! Oh, phew, the wife saw what was happening and Heimlich’d the choking fella, and then of course they make out like mad. One day on the way home after spending all day looking very closely at people’s eyeballs, Pippa spots a pair of binoculars in a store window. Next thing you know, she and Thomas are passing her new spy gear back and forth, watching Lensy Lothario and his missus go at it like porn stars — and maybe our cute protagonists are getting a little fired up in their own groinal areas. Of course, by the time they wrap it up and Thomas fetches his possibly-but-probably-not-quite satisfied lady a washcloth, the couple over yonder is on to page 107 of The Kama Sutra.

Anyway, the photographer guy tends to bring women to the apartment and talk them into nude photo shoots that eventually reach ecstatic moaning climaxes. Such women are noticeably not his wife. Meanwhile, Pippa continues looking very closely at peoples’ eyeballs and Thomas works on a bassline for a pharma ad and jeez, these two are dirt-boring. She acts like she has an itch not being scratched and he’s all insecure about it. I yawn in their general direction. Their eavesdropping goes up a level when Thomas concocts a gizmo allowing them to also hear what’s going on over there, and what’s going on over there is marital discord, lots of humping and notably, never, ever the shhhhkkkkk sound of drapes being closed. Then one day Mrs. Photographer happens to come into the optometrist’s office to get her eyeballs very closely looked at, and wouldn’t you know it, Pippa is there to very closely look at her eyeballs, and very closely look at her eyeballs she does. Her name is Julia. Is it me or did this just get slightly less boring?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Voyeurs is Body Double for those of us who wish there were 50 more 50 Shades of Grey movies to ruthlessly mock.

Performance Worth Watching: Let’s just remember how terrific Sweeney was in the highly underrated 2020 horror film Nocturne and move on.

Memorable Dialogue: “A vibrator isn’t connected to a soul.” — Pippa coins a new phrase to go on a sign next to the LIVE LAUGH LOVE plaque in your kitchen

Sex and Skin: Tons of it. There’s lots of Ts and As in Softcore City, where everything is simulated and the wax-and-sugar merchants rule.

Our Take: “Of all the eye clinics in the world,” Thomas says. “She walks into mine,” Pippa finishes. If only that was the dumbest twist in The Voyeurs, which has a few more doozies in store for us. The film’s first hour wants to stir our hormones with some salacious eroticism, but it’s more like a nap waiting to happen. It establishes its flimsy principal couple, who barely carry a thimbleful of wit between them, and tries very hard to convince us that Pippa has an Unhealthy Obsession with the scrump-happy neighbors and really just wants the high hard one herself maybe? It’s foggy. A burned-out bulb. A squint into the void.

After establishing Pippa’s apparent dissatisfaction and boredom with all too much tangible realism, the movie slides wholeheartedly into Preposterous Thriller waters and drowns itself. Thing is, you’ll wish it was more fun, that it leaned into its daft silliness. It becomes one of those precarious and convoluted keeping-a-secret movies where the main character could utter a single line of dialogue and render the plot derived from something resembling logic, but instead keeps making bad choices until there’s no escape from the labyrinth of pertinacious imbecility they’ve constructed for themselves.

Writer/director Michael Mohan, who is notably not Paul Verhoeven, keeps tongues firmly out of cheeks as if we’re supposed to take this crapola seriously, cutting in closeups of eyeballs between ludicrous twists as if he’s trying to Say Something about the Way We Look At Things. Uh huh. I’m sure that thematically justifies all the boobs and glutes being aired out here, unartful like the tawdriest of long-forgotten pay-cable crud. So many people got very naked for this thing, and it’s not even particularly sexy. That’s a crime, my friends. A crime.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Voyeurs wants your eyes to bug out while watching it. But all they’ll do during this dud is roll into the back of your head.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Voyeurs on Amazon Prime