The Woman in the Window review – so bad it’s not even funny

Amy Adams is a brilliant actress. Joe Wright is a great director. Tracy Letts seems like a very nice person. All of these things are true and all of these people are at the forefront of The Woman in the Window – yet this is, without a doubt, the worst thing any of them have ever done. In fact, it might just be the worst Hollywood thriller that anyone has done in a long, long time.

The film suffered a tumultuous production history and disappointing test screenings, yet had all the ingredients for success – not least the pulpy bestselling novel by A.J. Finn (a divisive, derivative book by an admittedly sociopathic author, but a head-turner nonetheless), on which Letts' script is based. Throw in the countless nods to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (and the filmmaker’s signature flourishes that are broadly peppered throughout the film), plus an attractive ensemble cast alongside Adams that includes Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Anthony Mackie. Again – so much potential. All of it squandered.

Adams is Dr. Anna Fox, an agoraphobic woman and child psychologist living in New York who spies on her newly arrived neighbours and becomes increasingly unsettled by what she witnesses. It could and should have been a haunting, eye-opening film to watch at the tail end of 14 months spent almost exclusively indoors, but Wright and Adams fail to ground Anna’s fears in any kind of truth – even if what she’s seeing isn’t real, there is no sense of her actually believing in her own point of view.

The Woman in the Window does not seem to exist in the same world as we do, yet tries so painstakingly hard to pretend that it does. It would be entertaining, intelligent even, if there was a smidge of self-awareness on display. People don’t move the way normal human beings move (watch out for some violent cross-window choreography), they don’t speak in logical sentences (“I like cat’s tongues” is a thing that is actually said), and no reactions convey anything resembling actual human emotion (literally every time Adams takes a breath). It’s stiff and chaotic at the same time, with every character acting as if they are in a different film from one another, moving as if controlled by magnets on a theatre stage. Agoraphobia, in theory, gives you a terrifying sense of claustrophobia – here it only conveys dull irritation.

This story is ripe for so many sincerely shocking revelations – is Anna seeing things? Who is that woman she saw in the house opposite? What is this family doing to each other? Who will make it out alive? But Letts and Wright lazily throw quick stereotypes around and waste the talent of their actors and the genre which, historically, has told some of cinema’s greatest and most terrifying tales.

Nobody in The Woman in the Window wants to be there, or seems to know why they are. They flip from confusion to anger in a heartbeat, but both states are so hammy that it’s impossible to take anything seriously. It’s like watching a very serious first-year film student suffer a very intense ketamine comedown: they're convinced they’re telling a very important and very scary story, but they keep tripping over the cameras, the actors, the words, any shred of dignity they still have left.

Wright has made bold, beautiful movies – the romantic Atonement and dazzling period piece Anna Karenina, to name a couple – and you can glimpse a few aesthetic choices here trying to reach those heights. But what’s the point in finding the right shade of dirty yellow light if all you’re going to do is make Amy Adams writhe around and hyperventilate in front of it for 100 minutes? It’s disrespectful, and baffling, that such a compelling actress (who should have won Oscars for Arrival, The Master, Junebug and more) would choose to act so pathetically on purpose.

And if the acting, direction, writing and movement wasn’t embarrassing enough, The Woman in the Window loses the last crumb of merit with its plain lack of common sense. Nobody uses a DSLR camera as a pair of binoculars. And you cannot signal to me that a woman has a mental illness by giving her wavy hair, only to try and convince me she is magically cured when she gets a blow dry. Read a book, go outside – do anything else but indulge in this trash.

The Woman in the Window is now streaming on Netflix.