Anna (Amy Adams) is an agoraphobic living in a big house but with little social interaction with anyone but her downstairs tenant David (Wyatt Russell), but the two are hardly more than acquaintances. So to compensate for her lack of actual social contacts, she spies on her neighbours - including the Russells, a couple with a son who have just recently moved in. And the son, Ethan (Fred Hechinger), drops by soon enough to introduce himself, and seems to be nice enough if somewhat off, as does his mother, Jane (Julianne Moore), a very personable woman with whom Anna has a bottle of wine. Only Alistair Russell (Gary Oldman) proves to be totally unlikeable judging from the brief encounter Anna has with him. Then Anna sees Jane getting stabbed in her house, and she does the right thing, she calls the police, then tries to run over to help the woman, but breaks down due to her agoraphobia. She wakes up in her own home and is questioned by police detectives Little (Brian Tyree Henry) and Norelli (Jeanine Serralles). She is also confronted with Alistair Russell, who insists his wife is still alive, but when he presents her to the police, it's not the Jane Anna has come to know (and is thus played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), and who rightly admits never having met Anna. Anna asks Ethan to back her up, but she insists the woman she sees before her is her mother. Anna is sure she has actually seen what she has seen, but with no shred of evidence, she does some research, some spying on the Russells, tries to pull Ethan over to her point of view - but all to naught, as Alistair eventually reports her for harrassment, and when she's confronted by the Russells and detectives Little and Norelli again, they all manage to convince her that she's delusional, after all she drinks alcohol and takes pills to treat her agoraphobia every day, and she tries to convince herself her husband (Anthony Mackie) and daughter (Mariah Bozeman) are still alive even if she has lost them in a car accident she rather miraculously survived herself. In a condition like hers its hardly surprising to see things - and on closer inspection, Anna comes to the conclusion that the others must be right and the woman she thinks she saw murdered has never existed in the first place. This gives Anna her piece of mind - until she finds the murdered Jane's face in a photo she took. And this is dangerous knowledge for the killer then ...

There are things to love about The Woman in the Window, it's slowburn in its buildup, has a likeably old-fashioned flair to it, and avoids spectacle of any kind. On the downside, the film's premise is a little too reminiscent of Hitchcock's Rear Window (with the murder scene also paying hommage to Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage), and while the film seems to shake the shadow of the earlier better movie when Anna comes to the realization she's delusional in a rather beautiful scene, this is soon nixed by a very forced resolution that seems to be put together rather randomly from contrived genre mainstays with little respect for believability. All this isn't saying it's a bad movie, as it's well put-together and also well-played, it's just a film that could have been more but is let down by its script.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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