Number 37 is a 2018 South African thriller about a wheelchair-bound man who witnesses a murder from his apartment window, soon entangling him in a vicious web.
There might not be a more influential director than Alfred Hitchcock, his films well more than a half a century on still shaping the way stories of suspense are told. Near countless movies have been called homage, borrowing themes and plots from the master in hopes of redressing these already timeless tales for a new era, some finding their own voice, others falling short. Now comes Nosipho Dumisa‘s gritty take on 1954 classic Rear Window, not so much a remake but reflection, layering in much that keeps it separate while never quite letting go of its roots.
Living in South Africa, Randal Hendricks (Irshaad Ally) makes a host of bad choices. First, he plans to get rich through a big drug deal. To do so, he borrows heavily from a dangerous loan shark named Emmie (Danny Ross), whose policy is basically pay up or die, gruesomely. When the deal goes sour, thugs break Randal’s back, leaving him a paraplegic and him with no way to pay Emmie. Forced into a seedy, rundown neighborhood with his devoted girlfriend Pam Ismael (Monique Rockman), he’s living on borrowed time as he tries to find ways to get out of the debt. Meanwhile, Pam gifts Randal a pair of binoculars for his birthday, hoping to give him something to do instead of wallowing about the house, and what he sees is plenty, including something that could solve his problems … or make it much, much worse.
Naturally, even as things remain familiar, Dumisa cranks up the ferocity, steering her debut film into far darker shadows, making her ‘protagonist’ from the start a bad guy, despite our sympathies. It would be foolish on my part to reveal what he sees and what his plan is to restore his balance, but in truth, that’s all secondary to the tension anyway. Just like Hitchcock’s original, this begins in voyeurism before sliding effortlessly into deception, then violence. We are meant to question what we see, though perhaps with less ambiguity and as such, there’s a lot here that keeps you guessing.
Further setting itself apart is the setting, whereas Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly were well-off to a degree, Randal and Pam face near poverty, living in a desperate corner of a crime-infested complex, Pam doing all she can to keep them afloat, only just coming into the fold, learning what trouble Randal is in. These at-home moments ring the most true, with both Ally and especially Rockman having the most impact. Rockman is sometimes breathlessly authentic, keeping the entire film hinged on her every move.
To a fault, the likes of Emmie and an equally troublesome bruiser named Lawyer (David Manuel) go to extremes, dialing up the ‘crazy’ to twelve, though a little credit goes to Manuel who spends a lot of time just being ‘seen’ through a window. Still, Number 37 doesn’t overdo them, putting must of its effort into the traps Randal soon finds himself ensnared. This and how it further pulls Pam into the spiral is what works best, their relationship bound at first by his limitations physically and then by the worsening plight of their schemes, which, by its end, is emotionally harrowing.
While significant lengths of Number 37 run a bit slow, none of it is without purpose, with Dumisa effectively tweaking the tension the more we travel closer to its finale. This is not an action movie, most of the characters confined to the tight frames of the windows they’re seen from, dialogue concentrated and deliberate. While it might lack the cinematic charms of Rear Window, this is nonetheless a worthy entry in the genre, recommended for fans of complex thrillers.