The Woman in the Window ** (2021, Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Fred Hechinger, Anthony Mackie, Julianne Moore, Wyatt Russell, Tracy Letts) – Movie Review

The Woman in the Window (2021) stars the likeable and sympathetic Amy Adams, who lands a big fat star role as clinically depressed, pill-popping, wine-drinking, agoraphobic child psychologist Anna Fox, living alone in an eerie Manhattan brownstone apartment, who starts to spy on her new neighbours, the Russells, across the street, and soon witnesses an act of deadly violence.

Anna Fox has been living in the gloomy, barely-lit apartment for the past ten months, apparently separated from her husband and their eight-year-old daughter. She has a tenant in the basement, David (Wyatt Russell), who is acting suspiciously. Then the Russells’ clearly troubled nearly 16-year-old son Ethan (Fred Hechinger) appears on her doorstep, and she reluctantly invites him inside, followed later by his oddly behaving mother, Jane Russell (Julianne Moore), and eventually the raging father, Alistair (Gary Oldman).

Tracy Letts appears as Anna’s psychiatrist Dr Landy, and also writes the screenplay, based on the novel by A J Finn.

Despite the presence of two Oscar winners, Amy Adams has the whole movie more or less entirely to herself. She is a good actress, and she is good, but maybe not good enough to fill the acres of empty space on the screen and in the script. Since this is a retro throwback mystery thriller, just imagine what Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck could have done with the role in the old days. They were not necessarily better actresses than Adams, but they were larger personality stars, and that is exactly what this role (and film) needs. Funnily enough, the film is similar to Witness to Murder (1954) with Stanwyck as a woman whose sanity is tested.

The film is okay, but not great. It is a script problem. The Woman in the Window borrows heavily from Hitchcock, referencing Spellbound (1945) in a clip and sharing a number of plot elements with Rear Window (1954) as well as a slow pan that shows Raymond Burr choking James Stewart. Indeed the heroine is both Gregory Peck from Spellbound and James Stewart from Rear Window. The heroine, like the author, is a film buff. The novel borrows the title of a 1944 Fritz Lang movie, The Woman in the Window. The heroine loves classic movies. The classic movie clips shown in this film are from Spellbound, Laura (1944) and Dark Passage (1947). It is risky, as well as cheeky, to reference these five star classic movies, and, okay, homage aside, some fresh ground needs to be carved out, and The Woman in the Window just does not manage it. Did they really have to call the character Jane Russell? Cue Google images of iconic actress Jane Russell of course.

Tracy Letts’s screenplay is smart but talky, and, don’t you know, it just has to go into mad killer overdrive at the climax just to try to give the audience some thrills. Too talky, and then too frenzied, are not a good mix. Of course the plot is unbelievable and unconvincing, that comes with the territory, but the film needs to make us believe the unbelievable and be convinced about unconvincing. This just does not happen.

Director Joe Wright tries to make it posh and polished, which is exactly wrong, when pulpy and trashy is what is needed. Moore and Oldman get into the mood, but these roles are not quality work for them. Joe Wright tries to distract the audience with flashy shots (eg when the camera descends through the core of a spiral staircase in a nod to Vertigo), and this is another mistake. He tries to make it ‘real’, with ‘real’ characters and ‘real’ locations, when it should remain an artificial movie creation, gloriously fake and set bound like Hitchcock’s Rear Window or like Panic Room, which it also in some ways resembles. His final error is to finish the movie in the wrong place, with an unsatisfying ending.

The Woman in the Window looks quite smart in Bruno Delbonnel’s photography, but Danny Elfman’s score is rather thin and generic, and not his best work.

All that said, The Woman in the Window is quite fun on its lowish, derivative level, a reasonable time-passing entertainment, teasing and tempting enough for mystery movie fans. It recalls Emily Blunt’s 2016 The Girl on the Train, another interesting semi-misfire, with another hard-working actress slightly struggling and another insistently ever-present score by Danny Elfman. In each case there is a better film trying to squeeze out from under it.

Apparently Wright had five days of reshoots after test audiences in July 2019 said they were confused by the plot.

It was made by Fox 2000 Pictures, but, after the Disney takeover, eventually it was released through Netflix by 20th Century Studios.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Movie Review

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