Movie Review of Hours (2013)

Hours is really quite a simple story. Much of its claustrophobic, anxious drama relies upon the fact that the on-going scene barely moves out of a single room.

Nolan accompanies his pregnant wife to a New Orleans hospital, just as Hurricane Katrina is settling overhead. Born two months early, his daughter is placed inside an incubator. A ventilator keeps her breathing, while a drip provides nutrients.

While her father sits with her, it's not lost on him that the rest of the hospital is being evacuated to safety. Assured that a crew will return to collect himself and his baby, Nolan waits.

But the levees break and the crew cannot reach him through the floodwater.

It's up to Nolan to learn quickly how to keep his baby girl alive. A task not made at all easy by the fact that the power is down, and all he has to keep that incubator working is a hand-held crank on a portable generator.

Every second counts, as his tiny daughter could suffocate. But those seconds turn into nightmare hours, in which her father is pushed to the very limits of his own energy. He dare not sleep, nor is there a plentiful supply of food.

But he is stubborn. Everyone always said that. Now it becomes his greatest strength.

To my mind, the mark of a good film is that it moves you.  Hours did that.  I found myself thoroughly rooting for Nolan, as each new moment brought a new emergency.

I'm not sure how realistic it would be that a man and his baby could be forgotten in such a crisis, but his reactions felt very real indeed.

Nolan wasn't some genius, half of his attempts to help the situation were doomed to failure. I found myself yelling at the screen, in my own futile efforts to stop him making another mistake. Nor was he a complete idiot.

For much of the time, he doggedly sat and worked things out, often by trial and error. Looking at the job before him and stubbornly keeping at things, until they were resolved.

I liked that. I liked that you never knew which venture would succeed, and which would land them in more trouble. It added so much to a relatively uncomplicated plot-line, that never once dragged. In fact, I was shocked when the closing credits came. The movie had passed so quickly!

This is the perfect film for fathers to watch with their daughters. Perhaps a great gift for Father's Day too.

The Bechdel Test requires a movie to have more than one named female character. They should have a conversation, which isn't about any male character.

Hours does have several named female characters, not least the baby girl in the incubator in 90 per cent of the scenes.

However, they never have a conversation. One is a newborn baby, who can't even breathe for herself, let alone engage in meaningful discussions. Another is Abigail, Nolan's wife, who mostly turns up in flashback scenes, wherein the couple are alone together. The rest are nurses, who speak to Nolan alone in the room.

Hours only fails the Bechdel Test on the lack of two females conversing. But I personally can forgive that, on the basis that it's a story about a father and his baby daughter. Everyone else was merely a cameo in an extremely tense and beautiful tale.