Look what the Academy has done to Amy Adams, following a hot streak of 6 nominations without a win, she is on her way to be Glenn Close no. 2, now she is stuck with a role doesn’t merit her talent in her long-delayed star vehicle, an adaptation of A.J. Finn’s top-selling whodunit novel, THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, which on paper, is so out of touch with our times, a career woman who two-times her husband and then brings ruination to him and their young daughter, therewith she is stricken by agoraphobia, vegetating in her spacious Manhattan brownstone, she yields to medication, tipples and hallucinations, until one horrible accident (a woman’s death) jolts her into questioning her sanity, and finally, she can strike out like nothing ever happens (after two life-claiming occurrences), the whole shebang is passé, and reeks of whore-shaming sexism.
Once a buzzy project may finally nab Adams the holy grail, the film is dead on arrival after the reshoots (alleged due to the negative feedback from test screenings) and multiple re-schedule of its release, but swimming against the tide, Yours Truly is not going to trash it, not least because Adams shores up the pulpy material with her full-bodied submersion into her ill-devised character, her heartfelt effusion is priceless, and one just cannot get enough of the tangible female bond between her and Moore, who has to mince her words carefully as the pivotal role of a victim with a flair of mystique. Then a hectoring Gary Oldman doesn’t know how to dial down, as a red herring, he needs to refrain from acting the obviousness.
Set up as a single-location thriller, patterning over Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954), the film asks our housebound heroine Anna Fox (Adams), a child psychiatrist, to play amateur sleuth, after she chances upon witnessing a murder across the street. For one thing, director Joe Wright (whose career is on a slippery slope) maxes out the limited spatiality to pleasingly chromatic effects, the whole movie boasts a sleek sheen which dazzles while the plot either meanders or skitters, and informs you where its money is spent (other than the paycheck for its stellar cast). Oddly, the ambience is ambivalent, the murderous intention or act has no threatening air, as if what you are watching is a prestige drama of a woman fighting for her sanity, and the reveal of the killer is hurried and he is such a featherweight menace to cow even a beaten woman like Anna, and the rickety rooftop has already suggested his slipshod downfall.
Still, THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW is meritless of the broadside, it makes a good fist the novel’s twisty appeal and Adams is faultless for her portrayal, like Tate Taylor’s THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (2016), it is conceived as a potboiler to build its star’s momentum and cash in box office receipts, but now, after losing that precious window of opportunity, it is an easy mark for dog pile and regrettably this is the new norm.
referential entries: Tate Taylor’s THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (2016, 6.6/10); Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954, 8.4/10); Joe Wright’s HANNA (2011, 6.5/10).
Title: The Woman in the Window
Year: 2021
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery
Director: Joe Wright
Screenwriter: Tracy Letts
based on the novel by A.J. Finn
Music: Danny Elfman
Cinematography: Bruno Delbonnel
Editing: Valerio Bonelli
Cast:
Amy Adams
Fred Hechinger
Gary Oldman
Brian Tyree Henry
Julianne Moore
Wyatt Russell
Anthony Mackie
Jennifer Jason Leigh
Jeanine Serralles
Tracy Letts
Mariah Bozeman
Rating: 6.4/10
