The Woman in the Window

Joe Wright’s keenly anticipated Netflix release oscillates between sophisticated Hitchcockian thriller and mad Gothic melodrama.

I spy: Amy Adams

Anna Fox likes nothing more than to curl up on the sofa on a Thursday afternoon and watch old movies. Movies like Dark Passage, Laura, Spellbound and, appropriately, Rear Window. The Woman in the Window, directed by Joe Wright, is drenched in all things Hitchcock, a veritable step-by-step guide for novice thriller-meisters. The glaring omission in Anna Fox’s DVD collection is Gaslight (albeit directed by George Cukor), which should have been another clue to Joe Wright’s knowing agenda. His film is based on A.J. Finn’s top-selling novel of 2018, ably fleshed out by Tracy Letts’ screenplay, and the London-born director gives it as much cinematic welly as he can get away with. After all, this is a claustrophobic psychological thriller set entirely in one Manhattan brownstone, where dear old Anna Fox is getting dafter by the day. She’s recovering from something or other, has been in therapy for fifteen years, hasn’t left the house in ten months and is guzzling colossal quantities of red wine, the better to wash down her pills.

The film’s saving grace is its leading lady, Amy Adams, who strides manfully down the tightrope fed her by Letts’ script, slipping from clear-eyed perspicuity into hallucinatory madness. She is at once fiercely bright and capable, yet also vulnerable and susceptible and – here’s the clincher – she is a professional psychologist with a keen interest in other people’s lives. There is little more entertaining than peering into the closeted worlds of one’s neighbours, but due to Anna’s agoraphobia, she can only do so behind her telephoto lens and twitching drapes. Her relationship with her neighbours is a tenuous affair, at several removes from sociable contact. When she ruffles the feathers of a new arrival across the street, an irascible Gary Oldman, he calls her, none too politely, a “drunken, shut-in, pill-popping cat lady.” Yet he has cause.

Then – and this will come as no surprise to those familiar with the likes of Rear Window, The Bedroom Window and The Girl on the Train – she sees something untoward. But who will believe her? And does she even believe her own eyes? Do we? Thanks to Wright’s stalking camerawork, Bruno Delbonnel’s atmospheric lighting and Danny Elfman’s sumptuous score, it’s hard not to be gripped by the events on screen. But some cheap horror tropes get in the way. By the close of play, then, we deserved more, needed less, and Anna’s descent from curious unease to rash panic is both implausible and ludicrous. The deep psychological recesses that may have been apparent in Finn’s novel are barely glimpsed here. It doesn’t say much for a film that is at its most intriguing during an initial tête-à-tête between Anna and her therapist, played by Tracy Letts himself (unbilled). It may lay the groundwork for what is to come, but soon that terra firma becomes all too precarious.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Fred Hechinger, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jeanine Serralles, Mariah Bozeman, Julianne Moore, Tracy Letts.

Dir Joe Wright, Pro Scott Rudin, Eli Bush and Anthony Katagas, Screenplay Tracy Letts, from the novel by A.J. Finn, Ph Bruno Delbonnel, Pro Des Kevin Thompson, Ed Valerio Bonelli, Music Danny Elfman, Costumes Albert Wolsky, Sound Paul Carter.

20th Century Studios/Fox 2000 Pictures/Scott Rudin Productions-Netflix.
101 mins. USA. 2021. Rel: 14 May 2021. Available on Netflix. Cert. 15.