The Woman in the Window (2021)

 Score: 4.5 / 5

The story of the making of this movie is long and disheartening, but it has been told elsewhere. Now that it has finally arrived (on Netflix, unfortunately), it actually feels disturbingly timely after the last year of our lives. It's the story, based on the delightful novel by A.J. Finn (pseudonym of the disgraced and fascinating Dan Mallory), of an agoraphobic woman stuck in her large house alone for months on end. After new neighbors move in across the street, she takes up spying on them from afar, though we imagine she's done this before, and to other neighbors. But when she suddenly witnesses a murder through their front windows, her options for helping are limited; it doesn't help that she's about as unreliable a witness as they come. It's a Hitchcockian whodunit thriller for the age of quarantine, and it's about as magnificent as you could ask for.

To be fair, this won't be everyone's cuppa. It's not exactly the most fresh when it comes to its ideas, especially after so many other recent and similar stories from Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins. Even despite its incredible cast, including Brian Tyree Henry, Wyatt Russell, and Tracy Letts (who also penned the screenplay) in bit parts, some will find this movie trite, overwrought, and unrealistic. Some won't like the exaggerated performances of Amy Adams and Gary Oldman. Many won't like the whirling camera, frenetic editing, and garish color palette. But these things, and more, made this movie one of the most unexpectedly rewarding I've seen recently. I expect it'll be in my Top 10 movies of 2021.

"Tell me to go outside," Anna Fox (Adams) pleads on the phone with her ex-husband (Anthony Mackie). We gather early on that her agoraphobia manifests specifically as an inability to go outside; perhaps the opening shot, swirling through the blackness and dotted with white flecks -- stars? snow? dust? -- is a representation of her fears of, who knows, falling upward through an endless sky? Anna seems fine interacting with other people, even if their conversations border on the absurd. Her psychiatrist (Letts) comes to visit her, not the other way around, and her tenant in the basement (Russell) tends to show up unexpectedly but warmly. Letts's dialogue leans into the idiosyncracy of her character, effectively putting us squarely within her frame of reference even as it quickly establishes wit, pain, fear, and a certain sophistication of percussive rhythm. Even as we learn she is severely depressed and mentally disordered, she has not lost her sense of humor, sarcasm, or functionality. Well, at least when she's not binge-drinking her wine.

Production designer Kevin Thompson (The Girl on the Train, Birdman, Funny Games) seems to have gone a bit gonzo with Anna's house, resulting in a highly theatrical space of wide open, wood-paneled doorways leading deeper into the maze of her house. Clearly meant to represent Anna's mind, the house is one of those old urban townhouses, rising up three or four floors via a steep central staircase that circles upwards through wide landings; the kind that Chekhov would say exists for the sole purpose of letting someone, eventually, fall all the way down by movie's end. Impossibly tall windows, almost always curtained and shuttered, exaggerate the closed-in feeling of isolation and intentionally walled-off nature of Anna's situation. Each table and countertop is littered with half-empty bottles and sometimes randomly full glasses of wine, revealing to us her lies about curtailing alcohol consumption while on heavy medications.

Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Inside Llewyn Davis, Big Eyes) injects psychedelic colors and light through the huge house windows into Anna's home, and it was through this that the film began to make sense to me. His whirling, constantly moving camera forces us into the house, from its cavernous living quarters to its claustrophobic underbelly and corners. The house is lit differently in every scene, from electric blue to garish pinks and sickly green, as if the windows were sheets of stained glass. Some scenes are overlaid entirely, as one memorable one of Anna in bed bathed in a thick blood-red hue, much as we expect from 1970s giallo films. With that in mind, and because the film spends so much time forcing us into this aesthetic, I started to appreciate the incredibly hard -- and thankless, to a mass audience -- work director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Hanna, Anna Karenina, Darkest Hour) and his team were doing.

The movie is about watching people, as of course was the case with so many Hitchcock films. Almost entirely taking place within the house, its contained setting of place (and, relatively, of time) make this a fairly straightforward Greek drama, complete with a chorus of sorts in terms of Anna's internal monologue and the voiceover presence of her ex-husband (Anthony Mackie) on the phone. By the time characters start entering through the foreboding front door, including each member of the Russell family separately (patriarch Gary Oldman, wife Julianne Moore, and son Fred Hechinger), we suspect all is not well with this otherwise nuclear family. Often these outside characters are shot with comparatively "normal" lighting, sharply contrasting the heady pseudo-reality of Anna's consciousness. When characters appear together, or when Anna is watching one of her many classic noir DVDs (Dark Passage, Laura, Spellbound), the movie utilizes the famed De Palma technique of split-diopter shots to showcase Anna in extreme closeup, framed or even upstaged by the fictions swirling in her mind.

Are we any different, deriving pleasure from watching Anna's insular suffering? Wright seems intent on, yes, luring us into her world, but with such outlandish, uninhibited artistic expression I can't help but feel he's also forcing us to recognize our own tendency toward voyeurism. Especially given the last year of our lives, we've all come to feel in some ways that our homes are our fortresses, and our level of obsession with personal comfort has reached a cultural tipping point. Anna is perhaps a little too much like us, collectively, than we'd care to admit. As with any play, we're made to feel as if we are present there with the protagonist, and once her secrets are revealed to us, we feel betrayed, unable to trust our narrator/proxy any more, and it is by this point, near the climax of the film, that things go completely off the rails. In a good way. Sort of.

Some will decry the finale of this movie as rote, a typical and semi-expected ending that, while still disturbing and surprisingly violent, relies heavily on the tried and true. A home invader, a chase up the stairs, a bloody showdown on rain-swept roof. It's the sort of cathartic release a movie like this usually needs, and I found it delightfully wicked even as its excesses outweighed its substance. That said, I think we can finally fit this movie into its generic niche: camp. Wright and his team pumping cinematic reference after homage after stolen imagery doesn't cheapen the film; this technique enhances the film, turning it into a meditation on the power not only of historic film to shape our understanding of new works (and real life), but of the ways our memory of things we see can reshape our perception of the world around us. More to the point, it's the kind of camp whose excess is its pride and in its prideful corruption of "good taste." It's meant, in many ways, to be seen as "bad" even as it critiques our understanding of voyeuristic art as standard, acceptable, and tasteful.

In pirating familiar movies, stories, and images, Wright twists them and violates them, drawing keen attention to them and making their meaning glaringly clear, profane as it becomes. One of the first shots of the movie is an extreme close-up of an extreme slow-motion shot from Hitchcock's Rear Window, from which this movie (and its source material) repeatedly draws direct inspiration; James Stewart's horrified face -- in a context absolutely un-horrific -- foreshadows, of course, but more importantly sets up a disconnect, an artistic artifice of disassociation and collage. This theme is heightened, later, even by the story itself: after Anna thinks she sees the murder of her neighbor Jane Russell (Moore) by her husband Alistair Russell (Oldman), she is forcibly reintroduced to an uncanny double of the woman, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Jane Russell, of course, as the film later reminds us, is the name of the star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and then there's Hitchcock and De Palma's famed use of doubling in mystery thrillers. These references are less about Wright stroking his own movie knowledge and more about deconstructing tropes and history, cutting-and-pasting an amalgamation dripping with ironic takes on genre, more like queer artists like Todd Haynes than anything resembling earnest arthouse fare.

From Wright, Delbonnel, Thompson, and Letts to even the ballsy, overwrought performances of the cast, everyone associated with this movie are making a strong, unspoken point of actively interrogating the tight bonds between pop culture and history, between art and life, and how none can exist without the others. It's a high-brow game they're playing, one that will certainly fly over the heads of most viewers watching from home. In fact, based on the scathing reviews of professionals and nobodies alike, I doubt many people at all found much to appreciate here. That seems less surprising than disappointing, as most people -- myself included -- assumed this would be cut from the same serious, bleak cloth as Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. But those reviewers are missing the simple fact that Wright's The Woman in the Window is a movie about those kinds of movies. It's a movie about our impressions of those kinds of movies, actually, and that even as cinephiles who think about these things, our impressions are as unreliable as the protagonists we love to watch.