Review: ‘Woman in the Window’ is, alas, a muddled mess
This image released by Netflix shows Amy Adams in a scene from “The Woman in the Window.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Netflix via AP)
The girl is not gone. There is one on the train, and another in the window.
“Woman in the Window,” A.J. Finn’s latest adaptation of the 2018 best-seller, the female-lead thriller, has gone from one page to another with its intriguing obscure titles. Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” kicked off a mini-craze that began, at least as a film, promisingly. David Fincher’s adaptation – an in-depth investigation of the wedding – is still the best of the bunch. But looking at the knockoff that followed, it is not saying much.
Just as in Tate Taylor’s adaptation of ‘The Girl on the Train’, Joe Wright’s ‘Woman in the Window’ is a seemingly made-for-movies story that becomes awkwardly lame in transfer. These are all books that trade heavily on cinematic tropes and traditions, and nothing more than a novel by Finn (real name Dan Mallory). The mix of voyeurism and psycho-drama in the book screams movies. This Hitchcock, along with Humphrey Bogart thriller “Dark Passage” and the very, very great ‘40s noir’ Laura, is baked in both the book and the film.
Perhaps this attracted so much talent for ‘Woman in the Window’, which debuted on Netflix on Friday. It has a niche for Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman, Brian Tyr Henry and even Anthony Mackie that is mostly heard on the phone. The screenplay is by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor Tracy Letts. The film is produced by Scott Rudin (his first film released after new allegations of bullying and abusive behavior forced him to step back from filmmaking).
All the materials are there. And yet ‘Woman in the Window’, which was a difficult path to release, turns out to be a pastiche of better films that have all the necessary shadows but none of the substance.
Adam plays the role of Anna Fox, an anti-child psychologist who, after a tragedy, is too afraid to leave her Harlem brownstone, which she keeps dark without lights. Just “Woman in the Window” has a hint of problems. Melodrama is maximized. In just a small character description you find psychology, children, trauma, grief and gentleness. Anna is heavily medicated, including some large glasses of red wine.
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As a narrator, she is so unbelievable that it makes the film’s upcoming twist more clear. (I say this as someone who usually comes to nothing.) Wright stays close to his point of view. The film barely steps outside Anna’s house, a 19th-century townhouse with a circular staircase and naturally a skylight. Our experience of every encounter, like Anna’s paranoia, is extremely high. No one just talks in “Women in the Window”. Every conversation of Anna is filled with investigation and discovery, hidden threats and landmines. The only exception is Henry’s sensitive, indifferent police detective, a grounding force in a film choking on its atmosphere.
But coming close to Anna’s own intense restlessness, ‘Woman in the Window’ attempts to do something similar to the recent Oscar winner ‘The Father’, which adapted the demeanor of its protagonist. This type of stuff Brian De Palma would eat for breakfast. He will, of course, find more disturbing and obscure avenues to explore here.
People just walk into Ana’s house, including her aspiring musician played by her basement tenant, Wyatt Russell. Across the street he has some bizarre meetings with members of a new family (Oldman, Moore and Fred Hechinger, who play the role of 15-year-old son Ethan). Picking up some very heavy signals, Ana begins to scare the boy and spies on the street. One night, she is looking through a telephoto lens, when she throws a woman against a wall and stabs her in the stomach. When the police responded to Anna, she told that no one was missing. The woman she met was introduced by Jane Russell – only now it is a different Jane, played by Jennifer Jason Leah.
With a churning score and some catchy camera tricks, Wright made it rough. But the pacing and rhythm – perhaps the result of a long post-production period of reshoots and rickets – seems wrong from the first minutes. Shame. Adult thrillers with stars and some scale are a rare breed. But the film, strained to high brow, when it should have gone completely trash, is a mess from beginning to end. After a year of quarantine and lockdown, it is even more fascinating – given the poor result – to listen to an initial question asked by Anna: “Why not make this day for you to go out?”
Netflix’s release “Woman in the Window” has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for violence and language. Running Time: 100 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
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