‘The Desperate Hour’ Review: Naomi Watts Meets an iPhone Meets a School Shooting

In “The Desperate Hour” (formerly titled “Lakewood”), Naomi Watts plays Amy Carr, who starts out in the late afternoon jogging through an upscale wooded suburb, mourning her husband’s death in a car crash the year before. The film tells the story of a woman and her partner, her significant other, the second self she can’t live without. The husband, named Peter, was friendly and bearded; we see him in a photo and hear him on a voicemail message, and he sounds like an ideal middle-class protector and mensch. She’s distraught without him.But that’s not the partner I’m talking about. “The Desperate Hour,” you see, is the tale of a woman and her trusty cell phone. In a way it’s their love story.In the last 25 years or so, there has been a species of movie — not quite a genre, more of an occasional blip — in which a brand of digital technology that is novel at the time gets a workout, both as structural device and as an exploration of how that technology is changing the world’s spirit. There...