The Woman in the Window, a new film by master book-adapter Joe Wright, has one of the more interesting pedigrees in recent movie history. To begin with, its source novel, by the pseudonymous writer A. J. Finn, received rhapsodic blurbs from such luminaries as Stephen King and Gillian Flynn, as well as a respectful if passionless write-up in the New Yorker by none other than Joyce Carol Oates. Less than a year later, the same magazine published a 12,000-word profile of Finn that tiptoed up to the edge of calling the author a plagiarist and fraud and explicitly compared him to the Matt Damon character in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Though Finn reportedly collected a $1 million fee for the movie rights to his book, the resulting film’s distribution was repeatedly delayed by reedits, COVID-19 shutdowns, and post-production sales. Having finally been released by Netflix, the thriller is at last ready to be viewed. Is it any good? Yes. And also, no.
Like its obvious influence The Girl on the Train, The Woman in the Window concerns a female protagonist whose narrative reliability is at issue. Anna Fox (Amy Adams) is a child psychologist who spends the bulk of her time drinking wine and downing the pills meant to combat her crippling agoraphobia. Seemingly estranged from her family, Anna conducts (or imagines) occasional phone conversations with her husband and daughter but rarely strays from the windows of her Harlem brownstone, lest she miss the comings and goings of her neighbors. Of particular interest to Anna are the Russells, who have just moved onto the block after relocating from out of town. Visited one evening by the family’s lonely teenager, Ethan (Fred Hechinger), Anna begins to suspect that the boy’s father, Alistair (Gary Oldman), is abusive. This notion is further advanced by a drop-in from Jane Russell (Julianne Moore), whose manic friendliness is surely a cover for her husband’s misdeeds.
Having previously directed well-received adaptations of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, Wright is at his best in these early scenes, in which he grants the novel’s uncertainties the room to expand and breathe. Locked away from the outside world, bereft of her family’s company, Anna has both professional and personal reasons to convince herself that a child in her purview needs help. Increasingly dependent on mood-altering substances, our heroine is all nerves and reflexes but can’t shake her basic faith in her hold on reality. These tensions are brought to a head when, in a well-shot episode, Anna sees Jane being stabbed to death inside the Russells’ uncurtained townhouse. (Like its source material, the movie owes an obvious and acknowledged debt to Rear Window.) On the telephone with emergency personnel, Anna is so distraught that she can barely remember her own address. Can we be sure that the crime hasn’t been a figment of her addled imagination?
Exacerbating this dramatic indeterminacy is the appearance, shortly after the police’s arrival, of a second person claiming to be Jane Russell. This Jane, accompanied and echoed by Alistair and Ethan, insists that she and Anna have never met and that her family has experienced no trauma, violent or otherwise. While the 40 minutes of filmmaking that follow this twist are fairly standard business — Anna pursues the truth while descending into a psychic crisis — the picture’s middle sequence is buoyed by an effective cast and Wright’s stylish direction. Where the movie gets into trouble is in its creators’ utter inability to stick the landing. By the time the credits rolled, I was nearly ready to wash my hands of derivative thrillers generally, and also of knives, neighbors, windows, and women.
For the sake of those viewers who have yet to read Finn’s novel, I will not spoil the ending here. Rather, I will merely point out that the final act of Wright’s film is a disaster not only because the denouement commences with ridiculous abruptness but because Wright and screenwriter Tracy Letts have stripped the finale of its prickly, sardonic politics. Crucial to the novel’s conclusion is the revelation that Anna has misplaced her trust because she simply cannot conceive that a character on the Left’s “identity” spectrum can be guilty. (To say more would be to give away too much.) Not so at the movie’s timid climax, which removes political judgments from the equation altogether and renders Anna a mere victim, kook, and fool.
The result of this alteration is an ending that is at once inferior to the book’s and a failure on its own terms. Finn’s novel surprises because it exploits its readers’ presumably liberal prejudices in the service of misdirection. Wright’s movie, with its lesser reversal, is comparatively flat and completely lacking in the book’s pungent irony. Its final moments may surprise, but they mean… not that much.
But despite this lapse in quality, The Woman in the Window is difficult to dismiss outright and arguably deserves to be watched on the basis of its lead performance alone. Adams, long a wellspring of emotional honesty on-screen, possesses the additional ability to make confusion feel both believable and emotionally complex. Take, for example, the moment in which Jane #2 makes her first appearance. Wright places his camera behind the interloper’s eyes and slowly zooms in on Anna’s face. The resulting expression — defiant, stricken, perplexed — may be worth the price of admission all by itself.
For audiences unmoved by such small victories, however, a calculus of a simpler kind exists. Does a bad quarter-hour of filmmaking override a relatively successful 70 minutes? Borrowing from Hamlet, does a “dram of evil” corrupt the whole? My answer, after some thought, is a tentative “no” to both questions. But it is a very close call.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
