[Film Review] The Woman in the Window (2021)

The Woman in the Window, a new Netflix thriller that dropped on May 14, is a textbook case of a film that stitches together a spate of criminally overused genre clichés. Apparently meaning to capitalize on the current craze for “twisty thrillers” (Gone Girl, Girl on the Train, etc.), this film has two “twists” that are so obvious they might as well be road signs for a McDonald’s. Only someone who has literally never seen a thriller before would be surprised by them. 

Amy Adams stars as Anna, a depressed and anxious middle-aged woman from Manhattan, who watches the world from the big front window of her rambling brownstone in fast-gentrifying South Harlem. It’s a new, unglamorous, uncosmetized Amy here, one who’s gained a bit of weight and looks her real age of 47; she’s got crow’s feet, cankles, and a double chin. Props to Amy for going there. No props to her for agreeing to be in this ridiculously derivative film. 

 Anna is severely agoraphobic and hasn’t left her house for months, and she’s also a pill-popper and a lush. Her main contacts with the outside world are a tenant named David who lives in her basement (Wyatt Russell -- Goldie and Kurt’s boy), and Dr. Landy (Tracy Letts, uncredited), a psychiatrist who makes house calls. In addition to spying on her neighbors, Anna talks on the phone daily with her estranged husband Ed (Anthony Mackie) and eight-year-old daughter Olivia (Mariah Bozeman), and watches a ton of old movies—Hitchcock’s Rear Window among them. Yes, it’s a supremely embarrassing homage, as this film is to Rear Window what a tuna fish sandwich is to caviar. 

Anna is particularly taken with the Russells, a couple who have just purchased a $5.5 million house across the street (snoopy Anna tracked down the selling price online.) The Russell family consists of a wealthy British banker named Alistair and his American wife, Jane, plus a teenage boy named Ethan. 

After spying on them for days, Anna befriends both Ethan (Fred Hechinger) and his mother Jane — a wild, party-girl blonde played by an almost-unrecognizable Julianne Moore (who doesn’t look anywhere near her real age of 60 here). She learns that all is not well at Chez Russell, as Alistair, played by Gary Oldman, is a bit of a tyrant. One evening while spying on the Russells as usual, Anna sees Alistair stab Jane in the stomach (the Russells conveniently never close their curtains). From there, the clichés just keep adding up:

• You have your mentally fragile main character who’s seen something bad through the neighbor’s window and isn’t believed by the police. 

• You have your sensitive and troubled teen-age boy giving off subtle Norman Bates vibes. 

• You have your case of a supposedly dead murder victim found very much alive. 

• You have your surly red-herring character with a violent past. 

• You have your unreliable viewpoint that tries to seduce the audience into believing something exists that isn’t actually there (and fails at it badly.) 

Adams does a fine job of portraying Anna, but it’s a thankless task. Way too much time is spent on Anna’s mental illness, a feature that ruins one of the major twists, as we already know not to trust her point of view because she’s batshit. The extensive mental health scenes leave little time to develop the other characters or invest the audience in the story. Director Joe Wright (Darkest Hour, Atonement) handles the “suspense” poorly and there are no macabre touches or wry human interest scenes that would appear in a real Hitchcock film (or even a Brian De Palma imitation.) 

The killer cast, which includes Jennifer Jason Leigh as well as Adams, Oldman, and Moore, is mostly wasted (Moore’s brief, vivid turn as the party girl is hands down the best part of this film). The script by Letts (double-dipping with his supporting role as Dr. Landy) is dull and pedestrian. Another waste, as Letts is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright in addition to being an actor—here he’s been saddled with a hackneyed plot based on a best-selling novel by A. J. Finn, and doesn’t seem to have any idea how to make it more interesting. Also a waste is a boring score that seems phoned-in by the great Danny Elfman.

Yes, the production budget of The Woman in the Window was probably pretty substantial to afford all these big names. Too bad that no one involved with it seems to know how to make a good thriller. Watch it only if you’re a die-hard Amy Adams fan or a lover of cinematic clichés. 

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