STREAMING
REAR WIND’OH!
The ludicrous potboiler The Woman in the Window is mostly a waste of a paranoid Amy Adams BY NATHAN WEINBENDER
A
.J. Finn’s bestseller The Woman in the Window spends a lot of time name-dropping classic film noir, its aggrieved narrator escaping into latenight marathons of old thrillers and noting out loud how similar her plight is to those of her favorite black-andwhite antiheroes. In fact, the book’s central mystery is noticeably reminiscent of Rear Window: As in that Alfred Hitchcock classic, a protagonist stuck in an apartment spends a lot of time peering through neighbors’ windows and becomes convinced that she has witnessed a murder in the building across the way. It’s one of those post-Gone Girl potboilers that wantonly manipulates perspective and piles one preposterous twist atop another, the sort of paperback that seems specifically engineered to be picked up in airport bookstores during long layovers. It’s also pretty silly, all told, but I still managed to breeze through it in only a couple of days. I also forgot nearly everything that happened within its pages, a benefit when watching director Joe Wright’s film adaptation of The Woman in the Window, which is just as breathlessly paced and just as disposable as its source material. It’s about a child psychologist named Anna Fox (Amy Adams), who is suffering from agoraphobia and never leaves her brownstone walk-up, spending all her time popping pills and washing them down with goblets of red wine. Beyond her layabout downstairs tenant
enough that the audience doesn’t wish they were watching those other films instead. But The Woman in the Window is no Hitchcock. It’s not enough that the third act reveal is laughably implausible, it also has to trot out the reliable thriller cliche of two characters fighting near a rickety skylight on a dark, stormy night. It must be said that Amy Adams gives it her all, but, (Wyatt Russell) and her psychiatrist (Tracy Letts, who like poor Anna Fox, she’s boxed in by this laborious also improbably wrote the screenplay), she hardly sees plot. She gets to shine in all of the actor-y moments — anyone at all. Even her husband (Anthony Mackie), livtear-streaked confessions, drug-induced spells, bug-eyed ing elsewhere because they’re separated, has to call her screeds of accusation — that we’ve come to expect from on the phone to check in. her, but there’s no real humanity behind them. Part of A new family, the Russells, moves in across the street, the problem is that once we get to the apparent murder, and Anna befriends both the wife, Jane (Julianne Moore), the movie devolves into one scene after another of Anna and the teenage son, Ethan (Fred Hechinger), in a matter creeping down dark corridors, peering around doorways of days. One night over even more wine, Jane drops and whispering into her cellphone (which, at one point, some hints that she and her business executive husband, emits a landline dial tone). There’s Alistair (Gary Oldman), don’t have the happiest no ebb and flow to the suspense, or of marriages, and that he’s particularly aggresTHE WOMAN any real sense of inescapable voyeursive toward young, impressionable Ethan. IN THE WINDOW ism. Now that all those plot breadcrumbs have Rated R If anything, The Woman in the been judiciously dropped, it’s time for the Directed by Joe Wright thriller elements to kick in, as Anna witnesses Starring Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Window is way too dignified for its Alistair stab Jane to death. Though maybe not. Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh own good. Wright pulls out a few operatic stylistic flourishes — splashPerhaps she hallucinated the whole thing (antiStreaming on Netflix es of bright red digital blood used as depressants don’t mix well with wine, after all), a scene transition, for instance, and because not only can the cops find no evidence an image of an overturned car materializing in Anna’s of a murder, but another woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) apartment — but this material needed to be amped up a shows up saying that she’s actually Jane, and that she’s whole lot more. Imagine what a maximalist like Brian very much alive. DePalma or a sensationalist like Paul Verhoeven could So, yes, the plot of The Woman in the Window is blahave done with it. Or even David Fincher, whose adaptatantly reminiscent of Hitchcock. That’s both its selling tion of Gone Girl struck exactly the right note between point and, ultimately, its biggest stumbling block, because horror and hilarity. Is it too much to ask for a trashy if you’re going to evoke the memory of some of the thriller that’s actually trashy? n greatest films of all time, you better tell a story engrossing
MAY 20, 2021 INLANDER 27
