Director Joe Wright (Darkest Hour) loves old movies. In his latest film, The Woman in the Window, the woebegone protagonist, Anna (Amy Adams), passes the lonely hours watching Laura, Dark Passage and Spellbound. However, Wright’s personal favorite from the TCM App must be Rear Window. He should have called his film Front Window, given Anna’s dangerous habit of spying on her neighbors in the brownstone across the narrow New York street, taking pictures with a telephoto lens of the suspicious lives of strangers.
Anna is a child psychologist, which only supports the idea that some are drawn to the field of therapy from their own need for counseling. She lives alone in a three-story brownstone, is drastically agoraphobic and her only face time is with her therapist (Tracy Letts, who wrote the screenplay) and her basement tenant David (Wyatt Russell). For three-quarters of its running time, The Woman in the Window fits into an old movie subgenre—let’s call it “the women in danger (and no one will believe them)” film (check out Sorry, Wrong Number for a good example). But then it turns into a more recent brand of old hat, the slasher film.
The Woman in the Window was scheduled for theatrical release in 2019 but unfavorable remarks at test screenings led to re-edits, which probably worsened the end result. Drydocked by COVID, the film was eventually sold to Netflix where it debuted this month. It wasn’t worth the wait. Wright maintains a suitably glum atmosphere, a murky palette of greys and greens, in a house where sunlight turns sickly pink when peering through the blinds. The day by day narrative structure (WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY … ) makes little sense and is eventually abandoned. Wright seems unable to shape the material into much of a thriller—and no, scary music by itself can’t do the job.
On the bright side, Adams gives a deliberately disoriented performance, wavering between memory and hallucination, emptying pill jars and wine bottles to dull her anxiety. Wright employed top actors in what turned out to be small but significant roles. Gary Oldman reprises Raymond Burr’s character in Rear Window as the menacing neighbor with secrets. Julianne Moore plays his flighty, odd wife—or (spoiler alert!) is she who she claims to be? Or is his wife the woman played by Jennifer Jason Leigh?
Based on the novel by A.J. Finn, The Woman in the Window covers interesting territory but gets lost in its own shadows. Maybe relying on test screenings is a bad way to make a movie?
