In the City Short Film Review Chika Kanamoto
A confluence of calamities has resulted in the arrival, now on Netflix, of "The Woman in the Window." Among them were a massive media merger, reshoots after test-audition defoliation and—of course—a global pandemic that paralyzed the moving-picture show industry for over a year. Ironically, those delays made the movie timelier.
So the story of a woman who doesn't leave her house for 10 months and thinks she witnesses a murder across the street of a sudden becomes more than only a well-made thriller with an outstanding ensemble cast. It's "Rear Window" for the COVID age. Merely for all the arts and crafts on display, the often crackling dialogue, and some stiff performances led past Amy Adams, "The Adult female in the Window" ultimately fails to deliver on its abundant potential. It'll leave you with a shrug rather than a gasp.
And there was such hope, likewise. Director Joe Wright ("Amende," "Pride & Prejudice") puts many of his showy camerawork instincts on display, making Adams' character's Manhattan brownstone feel both cavernous and claustrophobic. Gifted cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel ("Inside Llewyn Davis," "A Very Long Engagement") lights the rooms of her abode in garish pinks and dank blues, reflecting both her mania and her loneliness. And the always brilliant screenwriter and co-star Tracy Letts, in adapting A.J. Finn'south 2018 best-selling novel, establishes a snappy tone with rat-a-tat dialogue off the top. These exchanges let us know that Adams' Anna Fox has managed to maintain her sense of sense of humour, despite her depression and agoraphobia.
A psychologist who has suffered a breakup, Anna has cocooned herself with food delivery, classic films, and a steady diet of prescription drugs and carmine wine. (Wright employs a couple of cool, split-diopter shots with the television in the background and an extreme close-up of Anna's face in the foreground for an unsettling, DePalmaesque touch.) Simply the mixture of substances and isolation makes her perspective unreliable from the start, which ways the title cards indicating days of the week are useful only to the audience. And then again, who among united states of america hasn't felt like time is a apartment circle over the by year or and then?
"Tell me to go outside," she beseeches in one of several phone calls with her ex-husband (Anthony Mackie), who's also the father of her little daughter and the film's Greek chorus of sorts. He responds patiently, "Why not make today the day yous go outside?" But she doesn't, and Letts, as her therapist, is the one who comes to her. The rhythm of their sessions and the repetition of certain phrases, coupled with the solitary location, make these early moments of "The Woman in the Window" experience like a play on film in the best possible means. Adams reveals her character's instability through panicked trembles and manic cackles, notwithstanding with a fundamental wisdom underneath. Information technology's the kind of fine-tuned technique we've come to expect throughout her eclectic career.
But there's even more than pressing danger on the horizon, as foreshadowed past the drinking glass of wine she drops to the flooring with a shatter. Sopping up the red liquid with a stray piece of bit paper only emphasizes how much it looks like blood. The Russell family has moved in across the street, and Anna has watched their every movement very advisedly from the sanctity of her perch. (One particularly hit shot finds the shadow of a lace drape sprawled across the left side of her face up in the lamplight. Yous can tell Wright and Delbonnel reveled in the film'due south noir visual touches.)
"I tin see your house from my room," says the Russells' boyishly sweet, teenage son, Ethan (Fred Hechinger), the first time he comes to visit. He seems harmless enough, just soon later on, his mother, Jane, shows up and provides fifty-fifty more insight into the family unit. Julianne Moore plays her every bit a firecracker blonde: effervescent and engaging, funny and startlingly frank, she's just the spark Anna needs. "Oh, you're a shrink? That'south a twist!" she laughs as they feel each other out between sips of brandy and wine. She'south so fabulous, information technology's enough to make you wonder whether she's even real—and then wonder whether Anna is imagining it later when she swears she sees Jane's husband stabbing her to death in their kitchen.
Things get even more confusing when Jane's bellyaching hubby (Gary Oldman) turns upwardly at the frantic Anna's house with the police and the adult female he insists really is his wife, Jane—another blonde, more austere, now played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. She's alive, you lot run into. She'southward correct here. Then who was that other woman? Where is she now? And what might Anna's downstairs tenant, a flaky singer-songwriter played past Wyatt Russell, have to do with her? (Yous Marvel fans will exist disappointed to learn that despite the presence of both Mackie and Russell, we never get a Falcon and John Walker reunion here.)
The actual spelling-out of all the answers to these questions isn't nearly equally interesting every bit the mystery that could have been. Anna's attempts at playing detective (despite the presence of an bodily detective, played by Brian Tyree Henry), aren't as intriguing as the lingering doubt of whether she's a delusional stalker or she'due south actually onto something. An exasperated Oldman ferociously spits invective, calling her "a drunken, shut-in, pill-popping true cat lady," only the underlying trauma she'south working though gives the film some genuine heft. Watching Anna struggle to sound stable in small, subtle ways is very sorry equally she revisits the events that put her in this country. Emotional moments similar that do more to make this pic work, rather than its intense, horror-inspired final showdown.
Ultimately, "The Woman in the Window" offers a lot of build-upwards, a lot of possibility. But the revelation of what'south truly going on here is anticlimactic—the equivalent of endmost the defunction and turning away from the window with a disappointed sigh.
Now on Netflix.
Christy Lemire
Christy Lemire is a longtime movie critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Earlier that, she was the moving picture critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television serial "Ebert Presents At the Movies" reverse Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Honey Questionnaire here.
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The Woman in the Window (2021)
101 minutes
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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-woman-in-the-window-movie-review-2021
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