REVEW: 'The Woman in the Window' is trapped in bad nostalgia

Amy Adams stars in The Woman in the Window, directed by Joe Wright.

You know it’s bad when it sits on the shelf for two years and no one is willing to pick it up except Netflix, whose shotgun approach means they care more about quantity than quality. It’s quickly diluting their massive library, and we can throw The Woman in the Window onto their heaping discard pile. It is a complete waste of a strong A-list cast, a mishmash of cheap thrills, disparate elements and editing choices that muddled a dumb story that tried to be Hitchcockian, which I guess is appropriate considering the controversy behind the author of the original source material.

Anna Fox (Amy Adams) is a child psychologist suffering from anxiety due to past trauma living in New York. (This is already a strike against the story about a reclusive woman who lives in the most populous city in America). Her life is fueled by drugs and alcohol and her daily life consists of phone calls with her therapist, passing out, Duolingo lessons, passing out again, arguing with her basement tenant David (Wyatt Russell), passing out some more, and spying on her new neighbours: patriarch Alistair Russell (Gary Oldman), his wife Jane (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and their troubled son Ethan (Fred Hechinger).

The story is so bland and its jump-scare tricks so outdated – such as when David appears in a dark hallway out of nowhere, and he does this multiple times – this film wouldn’t even have survived in the 90s, a decade rife with films depicting vulnerable women, whose preferred weapon of self-defense is a kitchen knife, being tormented by men (or ghosts).

Gary Oldman as Alistair Russell.

There’s so many tonal shifts and a score so annoying – I find silence better at creating tension – that this must’ve seemed like a screenplay that was only good on paper. Director Joe Wright makes so many missteps, including numerous uses of computer screens, split screens and window screens that you almost can’t help but laugh. There’s even an extra-long close up of Anna’s contorted screaming face in the final climax, a trope so common in horror films it’s become a joke in itself and lampooned so well in the Scream series that it’s just pure comedy.

The final plot twist is as abrupt as every other decision in this film and it does a poor job of really laying down the breadcrumbs. It throws you a bunch of misdirection, and thankfully due to its strong performances from the cast it kind of works, but Hitchcockian thrillers work because the clues make sense; in this film, there just aren’t many clues, period.

I had trouble sitting through this film without getting frustrated and throwing up my arms in disgust. It was far too simplistic, and too often I’m wondering why Julianne Moore, Brian Tyree Henry and Tracy Letts (who wrote the screenplay) were so underused. Perhaps it’s because we’ve become accustomed to our new female empowerment era, but watching a woman drown herself in steady diet of wine and drugs for half the film and then suddenly finding the strength to conquer all demons at the most convenient time is no longer interesting nor particularly enlightening.

The Woman in the Window gets one star out of four.