Amy Adams stars in the long delayed The Woman in the Window. Is it worth the wait? Well, honestly, not really.
There is an opening scene in The Woman in the Window where if you don’t blink, you’ll catch a tribute to Rear Window, clearly the movie that this is inspired by. It’s a nice salute but sadly, the Adams show does not quite live up to the hype nor does it come close to what was achieved in the Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly starring Alfred Hitchcock classic.
Adams is Anna Fox, and we don’t know exactly why at first, but she is severely agoraphobic. She cannot go outside with the panic attacks being so fierce, she simply collapses. She lives in a large brownstone in Manhattan and has a tenant David (Wyatt Russell) who lives in her basement. Anna has been locked in her home for over 10 months now and like Stewart in Rear Window, one of her “things to do” to pass the time is to gaze out the window and try to interpret the lives of her neighbors.
That becomes a severe problem when she turns her look at the Russells. Everything is not what it seems over there. Or is it simply Anna’s meds, which have recently been changed and are prone to hallucinations. But she has proof, undeniable proof that something nefarious has happened between the players over there which include Gary Oldman’s Alistair, Julianne Moore’s Jane, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Jane, and the young teenager Ethan (Fred Hechinger) who seems to be simultaneously awkward, hauntingly frightened of his father and generally a 14-year-old who has not quite grown into the adulthood that is knocking on his door.
All of the players will encircle Anna’s life frequently and what is real and what is imagined won’t become an issue until late in the second act. Filmmaker Joe Wright (Atonement, Darkest Hour, Hanna, and Pride & Prejudice) frames it as such that we are with Anna from the get-go. She talks to her husband on the phone (they’re separated and her eight-year-old daughter lives with him) and we hear the care in Ed’s (Anthony Mackie) voice on the other end of the phone. He clearly had enough and thus, why they are separated. He also worries for the safety of their daughter, thus why she is with him.
As Ethan comes in and out of her home, the mystery seems to intensify. But it sadly feels flat. It just kind of sits there. There are no emotively explosive ebbs and flows that lead us to a thrilling conclusion. It is sadly one of the weakest of a wickedly talented filmmaker’s vitae. Wright has the right tone, feel, lighting and score, and even his actors give it their all. The failure, perhaps, lies in the script by Tracy Letts. It’s based on a book by A.J. Finn and perhaps the nuances of the terror that is supposed to emanate from this tale lie on the pages of Finn’s novel and that is where they stayed. Whatever it is, something got missed from the book to the screen. Sadly, that is often the case.
The only thing is, with The Woman in the Window, a third act arrives that makes it almost a farce. Everything that slightly worked over the previous two acts, which is not all that much, simply breaks apart into tiny pieces. Don’t be surprised if laughter is your reaction to the goings-on. Sometimes in films, we laugh at the jump scares, because that’s the body’s way of dealing with the terror just seen. The difference here is that what is occurring on screen is so bloody ridiculous that the laughter is just that… humor at filmmaking gone bat sh** crazy.
Adams does her best with what she is given. This is an esteemed actress who is thrown into a stew of emotions that never quite adds up to anything. She plays the what is real and what is imagined well enough that we believe it. But when aspects start to unravel (or do they?), the actress seems vacant and not sure where she is in the script. That’s saying something. There are few pros like Adams on the Hollywood landscape and for her to be lost in a movie means one thing: this thing is a mess.
Oldman, meanwhile, is a cartoon version of his straight-Englishman/baddie that he has perfected over decades of stellar work. The Oscar winner also isn’t given much dialogue to work with here that is rich. Therefore, it’s not that he mails it in. It is as if he knows that what he is saying is part of a larger farce, rather than a force of thrilling nature. Wyatt plays the tenant with a level of patience for his landlord that rapidly fades into disgust and disdain. The actor is solid, it’s just what his character does isn’t necessarily believable or endearing.
Wright directs with an even hand. I’ll give him that. But he never gets much from his actors that contribute to the dread, the fear, or even the feeling that things are not what they seem… or are they? Perhaps there is a reason this film has been bumped several times from the release calendar that had nothing to do with cinemas closing for Covid. It is a movie that is staid and sadly given its pedigree, simply uneventful. For a story about a woman stuck inside who witnesses a murder, or so she thinks, that is the biggest crime of all.
Grade: D