Hours is a 2013 American thriller film directed and written by Eric Heisserer. The film stars Paul Walker, Genesis Rodriguez, TJ Hassan, Shane Jacobsen, and Judd Lormand, and follows a father who struggles to keep his newborn infant daughter alive after the electricity cuts off in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The film premiered on March 10, 2013 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in the Topfer Theatre in Austin, Texas. It went on general release on December 13, 2013, two weeks after Paul Walker's death on November 30, 2013.
Plot
In 2005, before Hurricane Katrina strikes New Orleans, Nolan Hayes rushes his wife Abigail to the emergency room as she is in labor five weeks early. The doctor explains that his wife gave birth to a baby girl, but died of liver failure. Nolan refuses to accept her death and is in grief. He then learns that his newborn baby needs to be kept in a ventilator for the next two days before she can breathe on her own. The only problem is that the hurricane is beginning to flood the hospital and the ventilator cannot be moved.
When the hurricane becomes too strong, everyone evacuates the building, leaving only Nolan and his baby (whom he names Abigail, after her mother) in the empty hospital. A nurse promises to bring back help. The power then goes out and he is forced to find a way to keep his baby alive. He finds a hand-cranked generator in a storeroom and is able to manually charge the ventilator battery, but it only holds a charge for three minutes. He also finds some more IVs for the baby to keep her nourished, and some food and drinks for himself. With each charge, the battery life gets shorter. he juggles trying to get help and keeping the battery charged. Sometimes, he sits down with his baby and tells the story about how he met her mother. (The two met after stopping a bank robbery together.)
Nolan finds a stray dog hiding in the hospital and takes care of it. He names the dog Sherlock, while also having illusions of talking with his late wife. Nolan goes to the rooftop to find helicopters flying around the building. When he tries to signal one, criminals distract it by shooting at it, demanding to be rescued first. This leaves him furious, but he has to go charge the battery. He finds an ambulance on a flooded street and calls for help using its radio, but cannot wait for a reply.
Nolan searches for a spare battery, but has no luck. He does find a generator in a flooded basement room, but it is ruined from immersion and almost electrocutes him. He is barely in time to charge the battery again. Despite being awake for over 36 hours without power, running low on food, and having his hand cut from cranking the generator, he continues to come up with clever ways to charge the battery (e.g. using his foot and later a rod). He also plays with Sherlock and shares his lunch meat given to him by one of the hospital cooks.
Looters break into the hospital and steal food, drugs and saline water needed for the baby. One comes in Nolan's room and tries to steal food, but gets run off by Sherlock. Nolan later realizes that this man had robbed and killed the nurse who was bringing back supplies (as she promised earlier). Since Nolan has not slept in almost two days, he takes a shot of adrenaline to keep himself awake. Two more looters break in, looking for drugs. When Nolan finds that they both have guns, he takes two shots of the adrenaline and sneaks up on one, injecting him with it and giving him a fatal overdose. Nolan takes his rifle and surprises the other thug, who has discovered his baby. Nolan shakes his head "no" while holding the rifle on him. However, the man tries to shoot Nolan in revenge so Nolan shoots him in the head.
Nolan is now so exhausted, he has to use both his hands to slowly crank the handle, but breaks it off accidentally. His attempts to fix it fail, so he gives his child mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to keep her alive, but passes out from shock, stress, and exhaustion. He then hears the ventilator beeping; it is running out of power, but he is too weak to get up. He accepts that he has failed his child. Sherlock brings two paramedics, who drag him out. When he wakes up, the paramedics hear his baby crying. Abigail has finally learned to breathe on her own. The paramedics give Nolan his baby.
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On Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, the film holds an approval rating of 61% with an average rating of 5.05/10, based on 33 reviews.[3] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 55 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[4]
Variety film critic Joe Leydon wrote that Hours' "ingeniously simple setup is cunningly exploited for maximum suspense."[5]
