A man (Jason Segel) breaks into the empty holiday home of a tech billionaire. As he is about to leave though the billionaire (Jesse Plemons) and his wife (Lily Collins) appear on an unplanned getaway. Events then go from bad to worse. 

Windfall feels like an attempt at a Hitchcockian thriller where tension is slowly ratcheted up over the course of the film. It opens with a still shot of the holiday home as the full credits of the film play out before panning across to the rest of the home and the man. It features a brass instrumental score. It is set in one location and the film features a grand total of four actors on screen. None of whom are named. 

Everything about the film relies on the tension it can create from this situation. Plemons of course is excellent, an arrogant man who believes himself better than others around him and who has a clearly fractured relationship with his wife. Collins here is probably better than in anything else I have seen her in. Her character has made a choice with her life by marrying this man but she seems unsure whether it was the right one. Segel is perhaps the most impressive though given that he is most commonly a comic actor. Here he has an undercurrent of menace and seems thoroughly defeated by life. 

Unfortunately though the film did not manage to grip me completely and I started to waiver long before the short 92 minute running time was nearly up. My resolve was rewarded however with a wholly satisfying denouement though. A reward that somewhat elevated the film to being “fine”.