Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Woman in the Window’ on Netflix, a WTF Voyeur-Paranoia Thriller That Amy Adams Can’t Save

The sub-Rear Window looky-loo paranoia thriller The Woman in the Window is finally here, debuting on Netflix with a whimper after a harrowing journey to your living room. On paper, it looks like a winner: Gifted director Joe Wright (Atonement, Darkest Hour) adapts A.J. Finn’s bestselling novel with a cast including Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore and Anthony Mackie. But here’s the baggage it’s accumulated: It tested poorly with audiences, prompting delayed release dates, reshoots and rewrites; it’s produced by recently outed scumbag Scott Rudin; Finn was busted for being a compulsive liar; Adams’ career has been skidding lately; and it moldered on the shelf due to the pandemic before Disney/Fox gave up on it and let Netflix kind of unceremoniously dump it in your content menu. Now let’s see if it has some redeeming qualities.

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Poor Anna Fox (Adams). She’s an agoraphobe who hasn’t stepped outside her New York brownstone in 10 months. Her days are spent slopping around in her PJs and slippers in a wine- and pill-addled haze, petting her cat, talking on the phone with her estranged husband (Anthony Mackie), missing her young daughter, spilling to a psychotherapist who makes house calls — and watching old movies, including, but not limited to, Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal thriller Rear Window, in which Jimmy Stewart, sequestered in his apartment by a broken leg, compulsively watches the neighbors across the courtyard through his binoculars until one of them appears to commit murder. Hmm. The camera glides through Anna’s home: kitchen, dusty My Little Pony toy house, book nook, Hitchockian staircases, brittle old skylight, etc. Lovely place, lonely place. She prefers to keep the lights low. Down in her basement lives her tenant, David (Wyatt Russell), who seems nice until the plot decides he maybe shouldn’t be.

Anna’s foyer between her front doors is like an airlock on a spaceship buffering her from the cold, murderous vacuum of the outside world. She peers around her sheer curtains and notices a family moving in across the street. The teenage boy who lives there, Ethan Russell (Fred Hechinger), stops by with a gift from his mother; he seems a little strange and awkward, but he’s a nice kid. Later, it’s Halloween, and when Anna summons the courage to open the front door and yell at the little shits in the neighborhood who are egging her house, she gets a glimpse of Life Out There and faints. Thankfully, Julianne Moore is there to save her and give her a nip of brandy once she comes to. She plays Jane Russell, Ethan’s mom, and Anna and Jane hit it off. They share a little and dodge some of the heavier questions, but they laugh a lot. Anna really could use a friend, it seems, and she’s open with Jane about her agoraphobia. It might be the healthiest thing Anna’s done in a while.

That’s my cue to get into the high drama that wraps its hands around the neck of Anna’s life and squeezes, so to speak. She keeps looking out the window at the Russells’ house, which conveniently has no curtains, blinds, shutters or any other window dressings to speak of. Her unraveling begins when she suspects Russell family patriarch Alistair (Oldman) isn’t a very nice guy. Abusive and violent, maybe. She furiously Googles him with a plate of half-eaten sausage in the foreground, and gets out her camera with the zoom lens to assist her surveillance endeavors. She really stars unraveling when she watches Alistair put the business end of a butcher knife in Jane’s abdomen, prompting some more celebrities to visit her house, including Brian Tyree Henry as a detective and Jennifer Jason Leigh as a character who gives a terrific actress absolutely nothing interesting to do. Is all the strangeness a result of the pills and booze and mental illnesses funneling themselves through a TCM-inspired series of hallucinations? Or is this nutty stuff really happening? NOT GONNA SPOIL IT.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Rear Window, Vertigo, Spellbound, Rebecca — and that’s just the Hitchcock influence. There’s also Gaslight, the halfway-decent Shia LaBeouf house-arrest binoculars thriller Disturbia and the enjoyably trashy The Girl on the Train. But mostly TWITW brings to mind recent big-talent do-not-watch-while-sober misfires Serenity (director Steven Knight, Anne Hathaway, Matthew McConaughey) and The Last Thing He Wanted (director Dee Rees, Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Willem Dafoe).

Performance Worth Watching: OK, so it’s not Adams’ strongest work. But she mostly acquits herself from the grievously mediocre material, which requires some hard, likely unrewarding work.

Memorable Dialogue: Moore gets a juicy line when she first gets to know Adams’ Anna: “You’re a shrink? That’s a twist!”

And there’s something about Gary Oldman digging in and Gary Oldmanning a line like “YOU! You’re f—ing with the wrong family!”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Hey, lookit all the INFLUENCES this movie has! So many INFLUENCES. Good ones, even! It has the type of INFLUENCES that might make Hitchcock his damn self purse his lips and direct a mysterious, impenetrably droll expression in its general direction. Hooray for this movie!

I pause: LET ME CLEAR MY THROAT. So the case TWITW — which I affectionately pronounce TWIT-wuh — needs to make for itself is whether it’s better than watching the many other movies that inspired it (and, likely, the novel it’s based on, which I haven’t read). Wright is a skilled stylist whose clever visual flourishes appear to be handcuffed by the tight-quarters set pieces. The film unfolds wholly within Anna’s house, and he never fully establishes the ins and outs and nooks and crannies of the setting (a strong example of this is Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe).

We feel discombobulated by the wheres and what-have-yous of the brownstone, and maybe that’s intentional and key to keeping us within Anna’s purview, but the result is a sense of hacked-up discontinuity that’s glued together with ominous subtitles: MONDAY, reads one, and the next one goes, TUESDAY, and then WEDNESDAY, etc., as if the fact that the narrative unfolds over the course of one week (no subtitle reads THE NEXT MONDAY, because that would be ridiculous!) is somehow significant. I’m here to tell you that it is not significant.

So with its visual luster dulled, maybe the cast can make something of this? Nah. Moore is excellent, inspired even, in her one significant scene, and Russell shows a glimmer of scintillating suspicion in his nice-helpful-guy persona, but heavy hitters like Oldman, Mackie and Leigh are given nothing to do, and Henry, who’s shown significant talent as of late, couldn’t be playing a more drab, stock supporting character. As for Adams, well, this is the anti-glam role — complete with formless and comby COVID quarantine fashions — to counter her lounging-in-$1,400-eyeglasses posing in Nocturnal Animals. She’s playing a dull Psych-101 character who’s never allowed to be particularly interesting. As soon as she’s Googling with half-eaten sausage in the foreground, the movie’s sunk, because on-screen Googling, with or without half-eaten sausage, is the least dynamic scene for any actor or filmmaker to execute.

That leaves us with the story, which blends cliches skimmed from the surface of a voyeuristic De Palma thriller with the usual, the thinnest of post-traumatic anxiety psychodrama and ever-weary is-she-crazy-or-not unreliable-narrator gaslighting crapola. You’ll want to fire this movie into space — and then it turns on the jets for a final sequence that goes full loonybird camp, teasing us with the ludicrous OTT guilty-pleasure paranoia thriller it could’ve been. I can’t say TWITW is boring, but it’s absolutely a failure.

Our Call: SKIP IT, unless you want to take three strong drinks — make ’em doubles — with this movie and call me in the morning.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Woman in the Window on Netflix