Released: 14th May 2021 (Netflix)
Length: 100 Minutes
Certificate: 15
Director: Joe Wright
Starring: Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Anthony Mackie, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Fred Hechinger
Isolated thrillers create a unique style; they can be claustrophobic yet intimate, small-scale yet detailed. Their efforts into memorable stories and characters have stood out on the silver-screen. The latest release in the genre, The Woman In The Window, is not one of them; instead it’s easily the worst film of 2021 so far.
We follow the agoraphobic Anna Fox (Amy Adams), who lives a solitary life with her cat and the occasional guest. When she witnesses trouble with the Russell family across the street, Fox attempts to bring in the authorities while battling her own paranoid delusions. From the outset, it’s clear what the The Woman in The Window is trying to replicate. Classical Hitchcock thrillers continue to resonate with audiences today; but this effort misses the mark on every technique those films pioneered. Abrupt mood swings and ridiculous twists are the name of the game here, making for an unbelievably hackneyed experience. Clumsily moving between characters, motivations and reveals, there is no sense of connective tissue holding the film’s story together. The narrative expects us to be surprised when new information is revealed, yet the film is endlessly bouncing around different threads with little to no coherency. By the time the film’s twist villain is unveiled, you’ll be completely tuned out of its failed storytelling.
Many talented actors line the cast list, but with such a terrible script, nearly everyone finds themselves reduced to laughable lows. It all starts with our protagonist; while her internal problems are well established, Anna Fox proves hysterical for all the wrong reasons. Rather than drawing sympathy from audiences, her mental breakdowns feel more comical, clashing with the more serious tone. The way she has been written is simply too over-the-top to get invested in. Other actors are rather miniscule in their contributions; Julianne Moore as Jane Russell and Gary Oldman as Alistair Russell are thoroughly wasted in this production. The latter’s performance is the only one that reaches passable territory. I was left massively unimpressed by the other side characters, especially an unfeeling police detective with incredibly stilted dialogue. All told, the writing is so bad you could mistake it for a cheap B-movie at times; it’s baffling that the skilled production team at its centre could reach such embarrassing levels.
While The Woman in The Window takes place in a single household, the way it is pieced together leaves much to be desired. Because the house is fairly large and sprawling in its design, we rarely feel absorbed in the location. The camerawork can also be very jerky, often whipping across a room in a pitiful attempt to generate jump-scares. Even the efforts to portray Anna’s mental state fall short with no build-up or payoff to previous events; we simply see a surreal image pop up in her home with no rhyme or reason. At one point, a sudden splatter of blood across the image came off so amateurish it looked like something out of a student project. The music is equally muddled, suddenly intensifying in a desperate bid to crank up the tension. It doesn’t work and throughout the film there’s a constant disconnect between setting and characters.
From top to bottom, The Woman in The Window is an atrocious mess. Its aspirations fail miserably, the cast is utterly wasted and the production is edited so jarringly that you’ll wonder how it got approved for release. Needless to say, avoid this stinker.
Rating: 1/5 Stars (Terrible)