After they catch Segel ransacking their home, Plemons and Collins are quickly threatened into submission by him as Plemons tries to negotiate their safety. It’s clear that he and Collins are extremely wealthy, seeing as they have at least $5,000 and a Rolex watch just lying around the house.
At first that’s enough for Segel, but after his first attempt to leave is caught on a security camera and he in turn catches the couple as they’re fleeing the property, he returns to demand more — half a million dollars, in fact, which Plemons dutifully asks his assistant over Skype to have delivered to the house (he lies that it’s for another “Debbie,” implying a woman that Plemons apparently needs to pay off to get out of his life).
The issue is that it will take 24 hours for the money to get collected and delivered, which means that Segel, Collins, and an increasingly manic Plemons needs to spend a whole day together in the house. Cue up what the viewer expects to be the obligatory character moments, confessions, and revelations that always seem to happen in these kinds of pressure cooker circumstances.
And indeed, that’s what we get — sort of. Segel’s motivation is never revealed, although it’s heavily hinted that he’s collateral damage from the invention that made Plemons his billions: an algorithm that helps companies streamline their operations and return to profitability by laying off untold numbers of employees, a process that Plemons proudly defends.
While Segel, Plemons, and Collins all work hard here — sometimes a little too hard in Plemons’ case, after his more nuanced work in The Power of the Dog — the characters fall into the standard slots befitting their generic names: Segel is the enigmatic, possibly dangerous stranger who sets things in motion, Plemons is a ruthless CEO who detests “freeloaders” and wants “what’s fucking mine,” while Collins is the seemingly perfect wife who harbors hidden regrets and resentments.
Windfall might have been more interesting if the characters had been written against type, with Segel perhaps discovering that Plemons is not the hard-hearted, smug, possessive bastard that he seems to be (a wish he actually expresses later in the film). That would set up at least a somewhat fresher scenario and more moral complexity than what McDowell and company offer here.