Review of The Woman in the Window (2021) by Ahmedaiman1999 — 14 May 2021

Besides the fact it's directed by Joe Wright who's behind the 2005's brilliant adaptation of Jane Austen's masterwork, Pride and Prejudice, and that it stars Amy Adams in the leading role (because she's Amy Adams!), The Woman in the Window has been one of my most anticipated films of the year since knowing that its lead character suffers from agoraphobia, a subject that piqued my interest for the last couple of years. Amy Adams plays the eponymous heroine, Anna. An alcoholic agoraphobic child psychiatrist who when she's not drinking wine and watching movies she quotes word-for-word, she occupies herself by spying on her neighbours, observing their activities as some sort of a abreaction to her incapacitating phobia. This voyeuristic behaviour seems to be endorsed by her own psychiatrist. In his words, "curiosity is the evidence of a decreased depression pattern," a clue that her agoraphobia was resulted from depression. Anna's anxiety disorder doesn't merely confine her to her home, for it also keeps her in a constant fear of finding herself in stressful situations, the thing that makes her very easily startled. She perceives every noise or object coming from outside her house as a source of menace. Her eyes being shown in close-ups from the opening shot and throughout the movie (with one shot including her eye alongside Salvador Dalí's eye curtain from Hitchcock's Spellbound) could be interpreted as a symbol that fittingly ties up with the film's theme of voyeurism. But aside from that, Anna's eyes being always depicted wide-open makes them susceptible to assault from what she fears, which indicates that her constant state of apprehension is her own culprit. And Amy Adams conveys Anna's tumultuous emotions and lack of instability impeccably. Additionally, Bruno Delbonnel's noir-ish visual touches along with an exemplary sound design found their way across the film to express Anna's state of mind audiovisually. Her house is drenched in yellow to represent Anna's paranoia. Sharp, abrupt cuts reflect her nervous and fidgety conduct. Shots of a vertiginous staircase lend a sense of dizziness. The sound of doorknobs as they are twisted to open the door is enough to make Anna's heart skipping a beat and even fainting.

Ok, what comes of all that build-up? Or rather, how will all these pieces be combined and brought together into a cohesive whole? Easy. Just take all of these elements, amp them up to 11, put them in a blender and splatter them out! Dutch angles, asymmetrical compositions, extreme close-ups, low and high-contrast lighting (chiaroscuro), and more noir visual elements are copiously and gratuitously thrown on the screen in quick succession. The result is, they all just wind up being confusing and don't add up anything to what've been established earlier. What about the mystery? The movie keeps teetering between portraying Anna as a lunatic (nothing good comes off that save for a shot or two that harken back to the 19-century Gothic literature and the Madwoman trope) and depicting her as a victim to gaslighting (which was subtly foreshadowed earlier, as one of the films Ethan borrowed from Anna was George Cukor's Gaslight). Neither of these routes, however, are given enough delineation to be taken or rather to be torn between. But anyway, the movie quickly abandons the conundrum it was going for in favour of an easy, hackneyed device in a futile attempt to justify that jumbled mess of a second act, which builds towards an early, unearned reveal. But be that as it may, I didn't mind an anti-climactic ending as long as the window's curtain is finally going to be drawn. Much to my dismay, there was still a third act, and boy was it horrendous! The movie that's riddled with references to other noir films — including to Rear Window, of course, to the point I doubted if The Woman in the Window is actually a riff on it — has suddenly become a cheesy b-horror movie. Groovy! The fact that one side character shows up after another without being introduced beforehand didn't bother me. For with each of them, I saw many potential threads. All of which, unfortunately, never successfully weaves anything of interest with Anna. They all end up being mere plot devices without giving them even a fraction of the consideration they were supposedly afforded, and the incredible cast of A-listers can't really save them despite having a couple of moments where they truly shine, mainly Gary Oldman and Julianne Moore.