The Big Picture

The Voyeurs draws inspiration from Rear Window and Body Double, combining elements of voyeurism, sexual intrigue, and a sinister twist. The film explores voyeurism in the digital age, highlighting how modern technology and social media make it easier for people to spy on each other. The Voyeurs explores the concept of the male gaze, with the protagonist deriving pleasure from spying on her neighbors and becoming fixated on a sexually attractive man. The film also delves into the objectification that accompanies voyeurism.

It’s often been said that cinema is an inherently voyeuristic art form, by definition allowing viewers to look in on other people’s, albeit fictional, lives. Some filmmakers explore this subject directly, like Alfred Hitchcock with Psycho and more explicitly, Rear Window. The latter has influenced countless works throughout film and television history and its legacy continues into the 2020s, serving as a direct inspiration for the appropriately named 2021 erotic thriller The Voyeurs, starring Sydney Sweeney and Natasha Liu Bordizzo. The Voyeurs focuses on the sexual aspect of voyeurism and how it can lead to the development of parasocial relationships but keeps viewers guessing with a sinister third-act twist.

How Did ‘Rear Window’ Inspire ‘The Voyeurs?’
Image via Paramount Pictures

The Voyeurs follows young couple Pippa (Sweeney) and Thomas (Justice Smith)who move into a spacious loft apartment in Montreal and become fixated on the couple that live across the street from them. Their neighbors have massive windows and aren’t fond of using curtains or blinds, allowing Pippa and Thomas to spy on them using binoculars. It starts off as a bonding activity for them, a guilty pleasure that Pippa uses to spice up their sex life by watching their neighbors in the act. They come up with names and backstories for the couple, and things soon escalate when they crash their neighbors’ Halloween party to plant a device in their apartment that allows them to listen to their conversations.

The couple, whose names are later revealed to be Julia (Bordizzo) and Seb (Ben Hardy) don’t appear to have the healthiest relationship. Pippa and Thomas witness Seb, a photographer, have sex with several models while Julia is away, and when Julia confronts him about her suspicions of infidelity, he emotionally manipulates and physically abuses her. Things get even more complicated when Julia shows up to Pippa’s job and the two strike up a friendship, and she becomes determined to tell Julia the truth about Seb despite Thomas insisting she stay out of it and stop spying on their neighbors altogether.

The film clearly draws inspiration from both Rear Window and Brian de Palma’s Body Double, a 1984 erotic thriller that was also influenced by Hitchcock. Rear Window follows Jeff (Jimmy Stewart), a photo journalist confined to his New York City apartment after breaking his leg, who spies on his neighbors out of boredom but develops an obsession with a man across the street who he believes murdered his wife. Body Double follows out-of-work actor Jake (Craig Wasson) who starts spying on a beautiful woman dancing in front of a window while house-sitting in the Hollywood Hills, and later witnesses her murder (or so he thinks.) The Voyeurs gets its premise from Rear Window and its twist from Body Double but still manages to bring something different to the now largely obsolete erotic thriller genre.

Voyeurism in the Digital Age
Image via Amazon Studios

Explorations of voyeurism have persisted throughout cinema history, and the development of new technologies, forms of entertainment, and social media since the turn of the century have made it easier and more socially acceptable than ever to spy on each other. The Voyeurs attempts to make this point with the ultimate reveal that Julia and Seb knew they were being watched the whole time, orchestrating fake marital strife and even staging Julia’s suicide just to see how Pippa and Thomas would react. It was all part of an elaborate photography exhibition intending to show how, in Julia’s words, it’s “socially expected for us to be able to stalk people we may or may not know in order to get a glimpse into that partially true version of their lives.” Julia and Seb own the apartment Pippa and Thomas rented, and in an interview after their exhibition becomes a huge success, they admit the way they were able to get away with their covert surveillance was by including an image release form on the last page of their lease so that legally, Pippa and Thomas consented to being photographed. It plays into the willingness of people to sign their rights to privacy away by confirming they’ve “read the terms and conditions”, without really knowing what they’re consenting to.

In its attempt to comment on people’s willingness to spy on others and be spied upon themselves, The Voyeurs requires suspension of disbelief beyond just the fact that no one in the apartment complex owns curtains. Like Julia and Seb, Pippa and Thomas are tech-savvy millennials, but we never see them use the Internet to search for more information about their mysterious neighbors. Even after Pippa befriends Julia, and finds out her and her husband’s names and professions, she never Googles them or seeks out more information aside from what she can literally see from their apartment. It seems like an obvious step to take, especially as Pippa becomes more obsessed with the couple — and Seb in particular — as time goes on. Other recent surveillance thrillers like Searching and it’s standalone sequel Missing do a better job of incorporating the modern impulse to scour the Internet as a way to monitor others.

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‘The Voyeurs’ and the Male Gaze
Image via Amazon Prime Video

In Rear Window, the viewer’s perspective is informed almost exclusively by Jeff’s gaze. The film is notably one of three Hitchcock films referenced in Laura Mulvey’s famed essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, the origin of the concept of the male gaze. The Voyeurs joins the ranks of other modern surveillance thrillers like Watcher and Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi in which the female protagonist is both the observer and the one being observed, but this is not to say that these films utilize the female gaze. The Voyeurs leans into the erotic component of voyeurism in that Pippa becomes obsessed with spying on her neighbors not just because she derives pleasure from the act of looking, but because of her sexual attraction to Seb. Though Pippa is the one doing the gazing, her fascination with Seb is an example of the internalized male gaze.

Pippa enjoys observing the fascinating lives of her neighbors because she finds herself dissatisfied with her own life. After attending school for several years to become an ophthalmologist, she realizes she never had a rebellious phase and still wants time to live an exciting life before she and Thomas marry and have children. With her work, she realizes that now that the goal she had been working towards has come to fruition, she’s not entirely satisfied with the result. In her relationship, she is discontent with her sex life and becomes bored with Thomas, instead intrigued by the mysterious, overtly sexual Seb across the street. Despite the creepy and abusive behavior he exhibits, Pippa still pictures herself with him, enticed by a man so different from her sweet, loving boyfriend. She convinces herself that she continues to spy on them out of concern for Julia, and that exposing Seb’s infidelity is a selfless act done in the name of “girl code,” when really she is motivated more by her own lust for Seb than anything else.

When it’s finally revealed that Pippa had been part of Julia and Seb’s covert photography project all along, the male gaze is used against her as they reveal massive nude photographs of her taken by Seb. Not only had Julia and Seb been psychologically manipulating Pippa for months, but published and profited off of nude pictures that she was never aware would be made public. Though the project was a joint effort, Seb is the only one who feels guilt and remorse for taking part in deceiving Pippa, killing Thomas, and exploiting her trauma for profit, while Julia has convinced herself Pippa deserved it. Despite her ulterior motives, Pippa did try to help Julia, someone she perceived as a friend, by exposing Seb’s infidelity, only for Julia to engage in what is essentially revenge porn for the sake of art.

Though it is an erotic thriller, The Voyeurs is not a particularly sexy film, and more so comments upon the act of objectification that accompanies the practice of voyeurism and the parasocial relationships that can develop when viewing others as mere fictional characters rather than real people.