Netflix’s latest offering, ‘The Woman in The Window’ has all the trappings of a solid noir – it’s directed by the talented filmmaker Joe Wright, Amy Adams plays the psychologically struggling protagonist Anna Fox, and it’s an adaptation of AJ Finn’s stellar debut novel by the same name, which has been a New York Times Bestseller. However, all these superlatives do not add up to make it a captivating thriller.
The film revolves around Adams’ character, Anna Fox, who is agoraphobic and cannot step outside her house due to her intense fear of public spaces and repeated panic attacks. Therefore, she has confined herself in her artsy, modern yet ‘appropriately dark for a psychological thriller brownstone’ in New York, where she lives with her cat and drinks a copious amount of merlot. She also keeps an eye on the neighbours and spy on their private lives.
After Sharp Objects, Adams has once again taken up a character that is struggling with acute mental health issues. In Sharp Objects, she played the role of Camille, a journalist who inflicts self-harm and is struggling with long term depression, trauma and anxiety. Her mastery over her craft is evident in the way she differentiates between Camille and Anna Fox, who also suffers from trauma and depression.
In The Woman In The Window, Adams’ character is far more vulnerable on the surface, and each of her movements, panic attacks, breathlessness are more pronounced. In Adams’ capable hands, Anna’s brokenness and frailty fill the great chasm that bad storytelling leaves in this film.
The biggest undoing of this film is that, much like novelist AJ Finn (the author of the novel), Wright as well, takes too many cues from Hitchcock thrillers. In fact, the basic premise of having the window seat to someone else’s private life is borrowed from Hitchcock’s Rear Window, in which James Stewart’s character spies on neighbours after meeting with an accident and breaking his leg. Similarly, in both Rear Window as well as The Woman In The Window, voyeuristic spying, which is seemingly an innocent pastime, turns into a serious business and a matter of life and death after the protagonist witnesses a murder.
Finn’s novel is literally a Hitchcock thriller written in print. He not only references to the filmmaker’s iconic works (including Rear Window) but also borrows the novel’s tonality and mood from the master of suspense, and luckily for Finn, he has Hitchcock’s flamboyance as well as his restraint. Therefore, as a novel, it has self-awareness, fast-pace, lucidity and a satisfying climax.
Talking about Hitchcock’s influence on his work, in an interview to News18 in 2019, Finn had said, “So many books and films aim for cheap scares and shock tactics by overwhelming the audience with gore. But Hitchcock’s films have taste. In the Woman In The Window too, there is very little explicit violence; I wanted to emulate Hitchcock’s understated style in the book.”
Needless to say that where Finn had come out as triumphant, Wright has failed miserably. Hitchcock’s thriller template is perhaps one of the most imitated cinematic tropes of all times. Wright, therefore, tumbles headlong. One of the essential aspects of a Hitchcock film is its music and you cannot sit through his thrillers without facing the slow approaching din of imminent danger in the background score. However, in The Woman in The Window, Wright’s choice of music overpowers even the doom itself, and at one point, you do not care who the killer is; all you wish for is the background score to stop.
Similarly, Wright tries to borrow the visual palate and the mood from Hitchcock as well, but things become so obvious that it feels laughable. A rainstorm rages outside as the film approached climax; the umbrella that Anna Fox’s psychologist recommends her to use as an emotional crutch when she finally feels ready to venture outdoors is obviously red. The pill-popping, heavily drinking Anna goes through her life languishing with a montage of Hitchcock films.
The semi-climax is where The Woman in The Window turns into a complete chaos. The big reveal of Anna Fox’s personal life is something that any intelligent audience will be able to sniff out while watching the opening credit, and whether or not she is a reliable narrator is also not up for much debate after a while. However, the supporting cast with Adams drags this load as gracefully as they can. Wright, who made the beautiful film Atonement, also has his moments of brilliance, but unfortunately, they are way too few, and they disappear into cheap Hitchcock knockoffs too soon.
When Finn wrote The Woman in The Window (2018), the domestic crime thriller market was burgeoning due to the undisputed success of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012). Every other book in the following years was about a female narrator who was unreliable and had witnessed a crime. However, that was almost three years ago, and just because we are all at home for more than a year now, like Anna Fox (with a far limited supply of wine), doesn’t mean that we will believe any subpar quality film packaged with Netflix slickness to be highbrow and entertaining.
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