The Woman in the Window

When a new­ly released movie invokes the work of Alfred Hitch­cock in its first few min­utes, as Joe Wright’s home sur­veil­lance thriller The Woman in the Win­dow does with a glimpsed snip­pet of clear prog­en­i­tor Rear Win­dow, it makes a point­ed announce­ment. This may all out­ward­ly seem lurid and low­brow, the script reas­sures, but we know what we’re doing.

Wright’s lat­est aspires to the lev­el of refined trash – that crafti­er breed of pot­boil­er dis­tin­guish­ing its slum­my intrigue with tight for­mal econ­o­my, colour­ful loaded dia­logue, and a sala­cious psy­cho­sex­u­al sub­text. The pedi­gree of the tal­ent attached (Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, Jen­nifer Jason Leigh, Gary Old­man, and those are just the Oscar nom­i­nees) helps to sell the line that this will be an expen­sive take on cheap­ness, as well as a wor­thy take on atten­tion-grab­bing sensationalism.

And yet the audi­ence is often left feel­ing like Anna Fox, the pill-hap­py, increas­ing­ly para­noid ago­ra­phobe played by Adams – look­ing in antic­i­pa­tion over and over again, only to find that there’s noth­ing there. Pre­dictable where it should be clever, tame where it should be kinky, her voyeuris­tic peep­ing expos­es the dance with death next door as more of a list­less shuffle.

Anna sequesters her­self in a cav­ernous Upper Man­hat­tan brown­stone to cope with her ​“sep­a­ra­tion” from an unseen but def­i­nite­ly-still-alive hus­band and daugh­ter, heard chat­ting with her via phone calls in voiceover. When the Rus­sells move across the street, right into the scope of her tele­scop­ic lens, she befriends wife Jane (Moore, the sole cast mem­ber tak­ing a real bite out of the big steam­ing roast she’s been served) and gets bad vibes from hus­band Alis­tair (Old­man).

Anna’s dete­ri­o­rat­ing men­tal state takes a nose­dive once she sees Jane stabbed by an obscured assailant, and then gets worse when she calls the police and an unharmed Jane shows up, now with Leigh’s eeri­ly smil­ing face. From a line­up of sus­pects includ­ing her ex-con lodger (Wyatt Rus­sell), a sin­is­ter ther­a­pist (Tra­cy Letts, who also adapt­ed the source nov­el from not­ed liar AJ Finn), and the Rus­sells’ creepy, pos­si­bly devel­op­men­tal­ly stunt­ed kid (Fred Hechinger), get the most pro­sa­ic out­come still entail­ing mur­der and deception.

As bro­ken cin­e­mat­ic promis­es go, this one hurts worse than most, in part because we’ve been promised some­thing pre­cious and rare and sore­ly missed in the cur­rent topog­ra­phy of Hol­ly­wood. The high-sleaze erot­ic thriller is ripe for a come­back, but Anna’s clois­tered game of hide and seek with her own fear lacks even the faintest trace of sex or com­ic irony.

There’s no panache to enliv­en the sor­did qual­i­ty that’s sup­posed to be the main draw of this genre, the life­long styl­ist Wright hav­ing evi­dent­ly set him­self to autopi­lot. A sur­re­al appari­tion in Anna’s liv­ing room can­ni­ly sym­bol­is­es the per­me­abil­i­ty of mem­o­ry, and a blood-spat­ter across the screen gives a half­heart­ed shrug in the gen­er­al direc­tion of gial­lo. In either instance, the arti­er flour­ish­es do noth­ing but hint at the riski­er iter­a­tion of this movie we’ll nev­er see.

Wright’s film has lan­guished in post-pro­duc­tion pur­ga­to­ry for upwards of two years, dur­ing which time 20^th Cen­tu­ry Stu­dios, shift­ing course in the wake of their acqui­si­tion by Dis­ney, pawned it off to Net­flix. Some­where down the line, sig­nif­i­cant rewrites, reshoots, and reed­its were imple­ment­ed to trim the run time and avoid con­fu­sion after focus groups bris­tled in ear­ly screen­ings. In its errat­ic pac­ing and bypassed sub­plots, the cut now stream­ing teas­es the view­er with ves­tiges of the odd ends since pruned.

The sen­sa­tion that she’s nev­er safe, even in the con­fines of her own home, push­es Anna to the brink of her san­i­ty. As long as she’s con­tained in a movie this ano­dyne, how­ev­er, she has noth­ing to wor­ry about.