The Woman in the Window Is a Foggy Story with Some Transparent Problems

Extensively detailing the many ways in which The Woman in the Window is a sorry attempt at a Hitchcock imitation would likely be almost as tedious as the movie itself, so let me cut to the chase. If you’re looking for an engaging twist on Rear Window, keep looking. If you’re still curious about how director Joe Wright and writer and actor Tracy Letts have adapted the bestselling 2018 novel of the same name by Daniel Mallory (writing as A. J. Finn), read on. But you might want to close your blinds first.

Amy Adams as Anna Fox in The Woman in the Window. Melinda Sue Gordon/Netflix

Amy Adams stars as Anna Fox, a woman living alone in a nonsensically enormous Manhattan brownstone. Via a therapy session in the first few minutes of the movie, we learn that she’s experiencing agoraphobia due to a traumatic event about a year ago and that she’s previously attempted suicide. Her therapist (Letts) wants her to try a new medication, which will require her to avoid alcohol. Anna spends her time ignoring this restriction while watching the types of films this one is attempting to evoke—early in the movie we literally see the TV paused on a frame from Rear Window—and spying on her neighbors.

The family who just moved in across the street, the Russells, are particularly interesting. One by one they make their way over to Anna’s house: teenage Ethan (Fred Hechinger), father Alistair (Gary Oldman), and mother Jane (Julianne Moore), who shows up for an evening of wine and bonding over the pangs of motherhood. In this conversation Anna explains that her eight-year-old daughter is with her estranged husband, Ed (Anthony Mackie), who we’ve heard through voice-over conversations with Anna.

Anna and Jane get to know each other. Melinda Sue Gordon/Netflix

Of course, as both the trailer and the score telegraph, Anna soon witnesses something awful happen in the Russell home (through, of course, the titular window). And the police, based on their perception of her mental health and a revelation that makes even Anna question her memory, don’t take her account seriously. She’s left to attempt to unravel the mystery on her own, mostly through a tensionless series of web searches, lens adjustments, and treks up and down stairs.

Certainly one home can provide a rich canvas for taut dramatic energy—nearly all of Hitchcock’s film happens in front of one window in a much smaller apartment than Anna’s, and Copycat (which critics of Mallory’s have noted bears an eyebrow-raising resemblance to his book) is also about a woman trying to solve a murder while experiencing agoraphobia. However, the parameters of Anna’s home are left much too vague to play an active part in the storytelling, which is unfortunately representative of the movie generally.

Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brian Tyree Henry, Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, and Wyatt Russell in The Woman in the Window. Netflix

Though the supporting cast contains an array of well-respected actors (including, in addition to those already mentioned, Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Wyatt Russell), there’s not a single character aside from Anna with more than 10 minutes of screen time. While the 1-hour, 40-minute run time isn’t necessarily short, it does give the impression that there were significant cuts made, particularly to the role of Ethan, which is sapped of significance by his relative absence. The actors each do as well as they can with what they have—particularly Moore, whose forward friendliness is just off-kilter enough to have an engrossing edge—but all seem to be at the mercy of the cutting room floor.

Amy Adams’s performance is therefore not just the center of the movie but nearly the entire thing. And sure, she’s good. She’s Amy Adams! There’s a great deal of gasping and confused staring and reluctant conversation that she pulls it off competently, communicating her character’s distress without slipping so far off the rails that the audience can’t follow her. And yet, like her setting, the characterization is oddly dimensionless. A brief pan over a dollhouse in the opening sequence provides the on-the-nose metaphor the movie wants us to keep in mind, but the effect is more like a book of paper dolls.

Anna and Ethan. Netflix

There are very clear seams where Letts and Wright—neither of them strangers to thrillers or adaptations—have attempted to infuse some style and tension into the source material through careful staging and sporadic but inventive visual elements that gesture at Anna’s grief and disorientation. Independent of the movie as a whole, some of these elements are intriguing on their own, but they don’t really communicate anything specific enough to make an impact.

The Woman in the Window was originally slated to come out in fall 2019 but was pushed back numerous times, due in part to reedits and the pandemic, but possibly also to distance it from the February 2019 New Yorker article detailing a longtime pattern of bizarre behavior by Daniel Mallory. I’ve read the book, an absorbing page turner that unravels both mechanically and thematically as soon as one applies the slightest pressure to it. It’s clear why it was quickly optioned for a film, especially considering the last few years have churned out a surplus of book-to-screen mystery-thriller adaptations, such as Gone Girl, Big Little Lies, and—most relevantly, though not most successfully—The Girl on the Train. Add to that a surge of interest in stories about trauma, violence, and the ways in which women are often ignored on those topics, and it makes total sense that Letts, Wright, Adams, and the rest of the team were drawn to it.

Melinda Sue Gordon/Netflix

Unfortunately, the story ultimately doesn’t have anything to say about those topics, aside from a troubling takeaway that perhaps the “solution” to trauma might just be more trauma. Possibly more damning, over a year into lockdown, at which point the primary test a movie must pass is “Is it more interesting than the home I’ve been in for the last 14 months?”: it’s quite boring. So boring that the final shocking revelation feels less like a plot twist and more like the first time the movie has any plot at all after the mystery kicks off. I know it’s on Netflix, and you probably have Netflix, and you’re probably running out of things to watch on Netflix, but . . . have you considered watching Rear Window?