The Woman in the Window has been plagued by a series of problems from the beginning, so it isn’t surprising that this is where we ended up. When screened for test audiences, they were so confused by the film that screenwriter Tony Gilroy was brought in to do rewrites. Writer Tracy Letts admitted that adapting the book for film was harder than he anticipated, and basically said working on the film “kind of sucked”. Yikes.
The writer of the book – Dan Mallory under the pseudonym A.J Finn – was accused of being a serial liar and plagiarism, his dubious ways uncovered in an article from The New Yorker. So, when The Woman in the Window was sold by Disney to Netflix instead of pushing for a theatrical roll-out, the writing on the wall was as clear as day.
The film is centred around Anna Fox (Amy Adams), a child psychologist suffering from agoraphobia. She is unable to leave her house, so she spends her days pill popping and consuming a raging amount of alcohol to go with said pills. She also people watches from her house – hence the titular woman in the window.
One night, she hears a scream coming from the Russells’ home, the neighbours who just moved in across the street, and bolstered by a need to investigate, she takes her camera to the window to have a look. That’s when she sees a woman she knows as Jane Russell (Julianne Moore) being murdered.
By now you must be thinking that the premise of this sounds familiar. Well, yes, it’s in essence Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, with the added element of an unreliable witness. The unreliable female narrator was a big trend in thrillers when this book was released – think Gone Girl, Girl on the Train etc – but it feels kind of overdone at this point, especially since nothing about the film itself stands out.
Amy Adams of course does her best with what she has, so do Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman (he plays Alistair Russell), but all this A list talent is simply wasted in this lackluster film. Oh, Jennifer Jason Leigh is in this too, for no reason other than to be creepy and suspicious. Director Joe Wright borrows heavily from Hitchcock’s repertoire, to the point where it feels like a watered down version of a Hitchcock film, though missing all the suspense and intrigue.
Wright, who has created some of the most beautiful films in cinematic history, like Pride and Prejudice and Atonement, doesn’t know how to employ his skills here. There are some pretty moments, especially in the use of snowfall, but the film fails to capitalise on those moments, so Anna’s loss never resonates with us viewers.
The film is also a reunion for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s Wyatt Russell and Anthony Mackie, who play Anna’s tenant and estranged husband respectively. Russell’s David was obviously meant to be some red herring of sorts, so there isn’t much to his characterisation, other than being a douche. Fred Hechinger is miscast as Ethan Russell, and brings nothing to the role but exposition.
Maybe the events leading up to The Woman in the Window’s release was always going to be more interesting than the film itself. Poor Amy Adams – she deserved better.
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