Joe Wright’s adaptation of A. J. Finn’s 2018 novel, The Woman in the Window, isn’t particularly good, but it does present an interesting thriller about the oppressions existing at the intersection of disability and gender. The film, released on Netflix on May 14 after multiple distribution delays, follows Anna (Amy Adams), an Agoraphobic child psychologist living in a lavish New York City brownstone with one tenant living in her basement apartment. Anna hasn’t left her house in years, so her primary connection with the outside world comes through watching people outside her windows. We learn early on that she’s “separated” from her husband and child, taking numerous psychiatric medications, drinking a lot, and closely monitoring suspicious new neighbors who’ve recently moved in across the street.
Though the plot is simple, it sets the stage for a series of horrendous events that unfold as a disabled woman’s warnings are repeatedly ignored. Set almost entirely within Anna’s house, The Woman in the Window feels at times like a stage play, and not just because of the relatively static setting. The acting is also somewhat overwrought and excessively demonstrative, with Adams, in particular, hamming it up for the camera in a way that would carry well on stage, but isn’t as effective on film. There’s a sense at times that everyone involved felt like they had to overact to make up for the claustrophobic setting as Anna moves from bedroom to kitchen to hallway again. Overacting aside, the film has a persistent sense of tension and constant danger amplified by an accelerated time scale and ominous score.
As Anna’s obsession with her new neighbors deepens, she witnesses violence and shouting as the husband, Alistair Russell (Gary Oldman), his family. She drags her tenant into her theories that the wife, Jane (Jennifer Jason Leigh, but also Julianne Moore—more about that in a moment), and her son, Ethan (Fred Hechinger), are in trouble. She calls the police multiple times as she hears screams or thinks someone is in her apartment, setting up a core plot point: No one believes her reports, and the more she sounds the alarm, the more dismissive they are. After all, she’s a woman on psychiatric medication who lives with her cat, so the police treat her first with pity and then as a nuisance: unreliable, hallucinating, and tormented by conspiracy theories. A snarl of truth, lies, and deception emerges, something certainly familiar to Daniel Mallory (the man behind “A.J. Finn”), an author who perpetrated a truly wild and expansive series of scams.
Anna’s tenant mocks her, belittling her for being unable to leave the house. But she’s housebound for reasons that are used throughout the film to undermine her trustworthiness—that “separation,” for example, was a lethal car accident with Anna at the wheel that killed her husband and daughter. The conversations we think she’s having with her husband are really conversations with herself. The “woman sees something terrible and is ignored when she calls for help” narrative is a pop culture trope that dates back to Cassandra, the seer who warned of the fall of Troy in Aeschylus’s Orestia. But it’s more layered and complex in this case: Instead of being called crazy, Anna is literally ill. She has an anxiety disorder so severe that she can barely even bring herself to unlock her own door, let alone go outside, and is known throughout the neighborhood as a shut-in.
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