Mark Reviews Movies: THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 13, 2021

The Woman in the Window is a bit too ludicrous to be taken seriously and played far too seriously to be taken as a trashy thriller. The fun of it, perhaps, is in watching director Joe Wright go full-bore in his filmmaking technique, trying out every usual trick in the book (either as accepted/expected cliché or homage) and even using a few out-of-place ones to jar us even further. That doesn't help the material, which is predictable at best and laughable at worst, but we can at least appreciate the effort Wright has put into something so disposable.

The plot revolves around Anna Fox (Amy Adams), a child psychologist who has suffered from agoraphobia since a big, mysterious Something happened. She's married to, although separated from, Ed (Anthony Mackie), and the two have an 8-year-old daughter (played by Mariah Bozeman). Because of her condition, Anna doesn't see her family, although she makes a point of talking to them every day.

The wording of Anna's history and current situation is important for reasons that can't quite be explained without giving away too much (not that the first significant twist comes as a surprise). The movie's own version of that problem is a challenge that screenwriter Tracy Letts (who adapted A.J. Finn's novel and appears in a few scenes as Anna's psychiatrist) never quite overcomes. When we notice a character not talking about or acknowledging something mundane, it quickly becomes clear that the enigmatic is actually quite essential.

To cut past the mysterious back story, the basics here include that Anna, who has recently been prescribed new medication but keeps drinking glass after glass of wine, has become a bit of a nosy voyeur. There are new neighbors moving in across the street, and Anna has done just enough homework to know the names of this family of three.

The teenage son Ethan (Fred Hechinger) arrives with a gift of candle from his mother, before suggesting that things at home aren't as pleasant as they might seem from the outside. Anna's basement-dwelling tenant David (Wyatt Russell) looks for a knife to help the father/husband Alistair (Gary Oldman) unpack.

The most significant visitation from across the street is Jane (Julianne Moore), who arrives to help Anna after she has a panic attack from rowdy kids looking for Halloween candy. The two talk about Ethan, drink some wine, laugh about assorted things, and play some cards before Jane departs.

One night later, Anna is convinced she hears a scream from across the street. When she spies on the neighbor's house with her camera, she sees Jane, being tossed about the room with a knife sticking out of her abdomen (Yes, the premise—about a person stuck inside her home and making a hobby of keeping tabs on the neighbors, before believing that she's a witness to a crime through a camera—is a bit familiar, but thanks to Anna's obsession with classic films, Wright at least includes a direct visual reference of the very film you're thinking about right now).

The cops (including a compassionate detective played by low-key standout Brian Tyree Henry) don't believe Anna. Alistair convinces everyone that his wife is fine, because he can produce a second—to Anna, at least—Jane (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh in a glorified cameo). Anna, still stuck inside her house, tries to piece together who the first Jane was, what happened that night, and what has become of the woman she's convinced she met.

This, obviously, is all plot, and indeed, the whole of this story is nothing but mostly routine and pretty predictable plot. We can appreciate the performances for what they are and they're required to do within the scope of the material. Adams plays the emotionally and psychologically vulnerable Anna with admirable conviction (There is a scene, in which Wright basically has her perform a monologue as if on stage, that even someone as great as Adams can't quite sell, but the theatrical effect is unusual enough to be superficially intriguing). Oldman gets to shout with over-enunciated gusto, and there's a kind of amusing, subtle irritation to Russell's performance, as if the character knows and is frustrated that he has been cast as the suspicious tenant in someone else's murder mystery.

Red herrings, misdirection, and questions of Anna's uncertain perception abound, of course. While the plot is little more than a bunch of menacing scenes and fake-out scares and pieces of information being doled out with just enough frequency that we're not too annoyed by the delay, Wright seems to understand that the formal elements of this movie matter as much as—if not more than—the inevitable drip-drip of exposition. If a thriller has ever incorporated a certain filming technique, Wright embraces (lighting that only seems to exist to establish mood, the camera panning to reveal an unseen threat, things and people disappearing and re-appearing to reflect an uncertain narrator, etc.) and latches on to it tightly (all of those Dutch angles).

Without much beyond the plot, though, we can see through all of Wright's trickery. The Woman in the Window ultimately feels like a director trying to force suspense where there really isn't much in the first place.

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