The Woman in the Window is Amazing, Actually

May 20, 2021 3:06 PM

Tepid reviews for the moody Netflix thriller are all missing the point. In The Woman in the Window—the dark adaptation of A.J. Finn’s controversial bestselling thriller, streaming now on Netflix—director Joe Wright not only steals, but violates images and makes the mélange of film references profane, detached, and artificial. It’s a seedy movie with bizarre cinematography, unhinged editing, unusual acting, and a nonsensical narrative. It faced multiple release delays and, when it finally dropped last week, critical dismissal. Vulture described it as “incredibly silly,” while Rolling Stone wrote that “[the] playbook consists of ‘ape Hitchcock,’ followed by blank pages.” But perhaps it’s because of those choices and not in spite of them that The Woman in the Window is one of the most brilliant films of the year.
posted by folklore724 (43 comments total)

brb, registering 'Ape Hitchcock' sockpuppet.
posted by box at 3:16 PM on May 20, 2021 [17 favorites]

It's a dreadful, disjoint mess. While I criticize some films for having dialogue that doesn't flow, but just feels like the delivery of a series of lines that advance the plot, this isn't even that good. At times, characters feel like they're having different badly written conversations in the same room. Events appear random, like the writer(s) have no idea where they're going moment to moment. It's somewhere between too much work and impossible to follow.

My wife and I both decided it wasn't even worth finishing. F-, avoid.
posted by krisjohn at 3:19 PM on May 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

Watching Trixie and Katya watch this movie (spoilers abound) I think gave me everything I needed out of it.

Feels like this article gives way too much credit to a fabulist author and a just-okay director.
posted by supercres at 3:26 PM on May 20, 2021 [7 favorites]

The Woman in the Window, based on the book by Finn (the pen name of disgraced writer Daniel Mallory)

Me,with unreliable memory: Do I know of this "Daniel Mallory"?
Also me, with unreliable memory: Oh yeah, Daniel Mallory, the Daniel who writes the Shatner Chatner.
Me: "Disgraced"? What?!
Also me: Oh sorry, it's Daniel Lavery who does Shatner Chatner. I don't know this other Daniel.
posted by otherchaz at 3:26 PM on May 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

The “critic” seems to want to impress readers with all the films and directors he’s heard of.
posted by Ideefixe at 3:31 PM on May 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

From tweets when Daniel Mallory was pro/defiled in the New Yorker, from Daniel Mallory Ortberg:

Daniel M. Lavery
@daniel_m_lavery

Feb 4, 2019
*in an obviously wounded voice* oh, is the OTHER Daniel Mallory in the news today? good for him

*reads the first sentence* "Dan Mallory, a book editor turned novelist, is tall, good-looking, and clever." OH COME ON
posted by chavenet at 3:33 PM on May 20, 2021 [13 favorites]

Watching Trixie and Katya watch this movie yt (spoilers abound)...

I'm willing to try The Woman in the Window, but I am eager to watch more of Trixie and Katya.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:41 PM on May 20, 2021 [7 favorites]

It's Joe Wright. I'm going to at least give it a try.
posted by Bee'sWing at 3:51 PM on May 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

I agree with people who say this is a bad movie but I absolutely do not agree that it is unwatchable.

It is highly watchable, extremely entertaining, tackily beautiful trash.

And Julianne Moore has only one real scene, but she's so good in it that—in a "better" movie—she'd probably be nominated for a whole slew of awards.
posted by Atom Eyes at 4:05 PM on May 20, 2021 [6 favorites]

I saw the original cut for work back in ... fall 2019? It was pretty dull.

The article skips over the fact this is a Scott Rudin production.
posted by roger ackroyd at 4:07 PM on May 20, 2021 [4 favorites]

I thought it was a terrible movie, but I wouldn’t call it dull.

The scenes with the cops were hilarious.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:10 PM on May 20, 2021

I haven't seen the movie but I read the book. It's a very fast read, very compelling, but the two (more?) twists I saw from a mile away, and I suck at predicting twists. I remember thinking "that wouldn't make a very good movie" and a few months later saw the trailer for this. Then again, Joe Wright is a really talented director, but if he's indeed doing a meta-commentary with this movie, who's his audience? Seen-it-all movie critics?
posted by zardoz at 4:13 PM on May 20, 2021

The cast is wonderful (it was great especially to see Jennifer Jason Leigh). I wish Oldman had hammed it up a little more; the whole thing could have benefited from quite a bit more ham.

The review is ridiculous. Comparing a hack like Wright (Atonement should have been career-ending; also, my vote for worst Austen adaptation) to Haynes and Sirk.... what the actual hell?
posted by mr_roboto at 4:18 PM on May 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

I always dislike these, "this bad movie is secretly really good" takes where a lot of effort is then spent trying to justify all the things that make it bad. Just admit that you like a bad movie, you cowards. There can be beauty and fun in imperfection. It's okay to like it or appreciate what the filmmakers were striving for even while admitting that it didn't work.

Bad movies can have moments of genius and artistry. Great actors and great directors can also make absolutely terrible films. It's okay to enjoy them. I'd much rather watch a bad movie than a mediocre one. Give me good or give me bad, just don't give me boring.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 4:19 PM on May 20, 2021 [30 favorites]

The cast is wonderful (it was great especially to see Jennifer Jason Leigh)

I will watch at least half and usually more of anything with JJL and hope she's one of the ones who will keep on keepin' on into her twilight.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 4:44 PM on May 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

One more comment about the review... what's the deal with introducing Haynes as "queer auteur Todd Haynes"? It seems weirdly ghettoizing. None of the discussion of Haynes' work involves representations of queerness; rather, it discusses his use of pastiche and melodrama. Sexuality is not touched upon anywhere else in the piece, nor is gender (for a movie that could really use a discussion of gender, by the way). Why is it necessary to identify Haynes as queer? It's kind of creepy, like talking about "father-of-two director Joe Wright" or "cishet star Amy Adams".
posted by mr_roboto at 5:00 PM on May 20, 2021 [8 favorites]

I expected Richard Brody, so am surprised.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:49 PM on May 20, 2021

a friend mentioned this movie to me just the other day. He liked it. And he's not the kind of guy who has much tolerance for ... "artsy shit" as he'd put it.

So now I'm genuinely intrigued.
posted by philip-random at 6:02 PM on May 20, 2021

Hmm, without having seen The Woman in the Window and thus having no comment to make on its merits, I will still stand up a bit for the short essay for at least making a start at what critics are supposed to do with movies, which is try to understand them for what they are and communicate that understanding.

In the case of this essay, Turner asserts there are numerous direct borrowings or quotings of other movies which he believes are done to provide a underlying subtext to the film. He mentions several of these uses and connects them to the work of other directors, most notably Todd Haynes, who did indeed also make use of a kind of quoting/homage method to suggest something beyond what was directly spelled out in the dialogue in some of his most well known films.

Turner is asking an essential question in watching this movie, if the director took time and care to do something that an informed viewer like Turner feels himself to be notices as a reference, then why was it done and how does that inform the rest of the film, if at all. By noting the way Haynes used reference to Sirk in some of his films, as, say, Far from Heaven references Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, Turner traces that likeness in use to how each director uses old Hollywood to comment on their current era. Turner would have done better to spell some of that out more explicitly, as simply noting the similarities isn't the same as attempting to come to terms with the why of them in providing a deeper logic that might be at play.

Haynes use of TV, with Frank's job and the Frank and Cathy being so ideal they are referred to as Mr and Mrs Magnatech, as if they are a TV family. Haynes situates the drama in the past in homage to Sirk's All That Heaven Allows to create a sense of distance yet familiarity that draws the sympathetic viewer into the drama and lets them give themselves over to it feeling it as being of an era past, but the repeated references to TV and the subject matter that takes Sirk's look at infidelity and extends it to gay desire and interracial romance pushes the theme to the then present day, where gay and interracial sexuality was virtually still nowhere to be seen on TV. The past as repressive then also becomes extended to the present and the "old time" vibe takes on a different kind of bite in demonstrating times haven't changed that much at all.

That doesn't need to be Turner's exact take on Haynes, but the basic connection he suggests at least follows roughly similar lines and that is what he draws on in seeing Woman in the Window by suggesting Wright is using old Hollywood images and tropes to somewhat explicitly question the narrative as shown by suggesting there is another element at work that informs how one might understand the movie as a whole, with the emphasis seeming to be on the idea that the main character is so invested in fiction that it is seeping into how see perceives events around her and that then might well have some added subtext for some viewers on how they think about our media saturated reality of the moment. That's what I took from the article anyway, but Turner makes the mistake of following the reviewer trend of talking about that in terms of "good" and "bad" and liking the movie rather than more fully expressing his read of the movie as evidence enough of there being something more involving than a plot summary might suggest. That's always just gonna lead to arguing over taste, which really isn't all that useful.
posted by gusottertrout at 6:15 PM on May 20, 2021 [10 favorites]

Given the rhetorical loopholes I sometimes leap through trying to rationalize/explain my love of questionable horror movies, maudlin melodramas, etc. I can recognize this for what it is.

Feel free to like the crap thing if it makes you happy, friends. Set yourself free.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:18 PM on May 20, 2021 [7 favorites]

Events appear random, like the writer(s) have no idea where they're going moment to moment. It's somewhere between too much work and impossible to follow.

So...non fiction?
posted by Thorzdad at 6:19 PM on May 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

Feel free to like the crap thing if it makes you happy, friends. Set yourself free.

Heh. One might say the same to you for putting yourself in a position of liking "crap" for, it appears, simply not following the usual patterns of "good" commercial films, which considered as such often for how well they follow a set of largely arbitrary rules, which change over time and thus often don't define anything much more than current convention. Free yourself from such labeling!
posted by gusottertrout at 6:32 PM on May 20, 2021

Everything about this movie screams remake of Rear Window...but it's not? My "to watch list" is too long to add this without some glowing recs on Fanfare.
posted by OHenryPacey at 6:54 PM on May 20, 2021

I absolutely loved the movie, even granted its many faults, because Amy Adams is filmed looking like a for real genuine person living through COVID. She doesnt have obvious makeup, wears a greyish muumuu and a comfy-looking overcoat, has bags under her eyes, and she looks a little overweight or bloated. I cant think of another movie with a sympathetic female protagonist presented this way. And no one in the movie comments on it! Its just, that is how she looks. If someone said "Illusory, youre looking like Amy Adams today" Id know exactly what they mean =)
posted by Illusory contour at 7:25 PM on May 20, 2021 [9 favorites]

It is highly watchable, extremely entertaining, tackily beautiful trash.

Yup.

And he's not the kind of guy who has much tolerance for ... "artsy shit" as he'd put it.

The "artsy shit", IMO, is entirely in the mind of this essay writer - it's a homage to Hitchcock & Rear Window with some B-movie twists thrown in. Wright is lampshading the comparisons by flat out having the Adams character constantly watching various classic noirs & thrillers including Rear Window.

If it was the 90's it would be one of those direct-to-video B films that somehow wound up with a bunch of A-list actors in it.

And it's not at all terrible as a B film, although I think I pretty literally forgot who the real villain was about ten minutes after it finished.

informs how one might understand the movie as a whole, with the emphasis seeming to be on the idea that the main character is so invested in fiction that it is seeping into how see perceives events around her and that then might well have some added subtext for some viewers on how they think about our media saturated reality of the moment.

If we were talking about a film made by Blue Velvet/Twin Peaks-era David Lynch, or Naked Lunch-era Cronenberg, or even Blade Runner-era Ridley Scott, I would find this plausible. As it sits, though, nah. Like I said, I think this is just Wright lampshading things - given the basic setup of "housebound person sees something terrible" thriller, comparisons to Rear Window are inevitable, so you might as well lean into it.

And honestly it's the twists that sabotage the more complex interpretations of the film - that's when any hope of a serious subtext goes out the window.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:47 PM on May 20, 2021 [8 favorites]

"crappy thing is actually good you guys or else i may have to call in to question years of cultivating very specific tastes. pls listen ok"
posted by Bwentman at 8:25 PM on May 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

hey, a remake that's not terrible and not brilliant with some interesting acting...
posted by ovvl at 9:26 PM on May 20, 2021

Wright is lampshading the comparisons by flat out having the Adams character constantly watching various classic noirs & thrillers including Rear Window.

This stuff is also in the (terrible) novel the movie is based on.
posted by oulipian at 9:32 PM on May 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

It is highly watchable, extremely entertaining, tackily beautiful trash

YOU ARE TEARING ME APART LISA
posted by flabdablet at 2:56 AM on May 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Sheesh... you folks just made me want to watch this!
posted by SoberHighland at 4:33 AM on May 21, 2021

This was an almost terrible movie that wasn't dreadful to watch. I just didn't find anything surprising or interesting in it. If you take the cops and Adams's character out of the mix, the killer could only be one of 4 people, or the entire thing was imagined by Adams's character. I was expecting a twist at the end, and if that is what they think is a twist -- maybe I'm just jaded and have seen too many noir movies. I felt like the movie references were like a club over the head -- nothing subtle in who the director was paying homage to. This is way too much of Rear Window -- the isolated voyeur, the witnessing of a possible murder, the peeking into different apartments, the use of the telescopic camera -- one of those references would have been enough, but all together along with actual screen shots from Rear Window in the background was all just too much for it not to be a remake.

I knew the cat and the skylight were going to become important the moment they were mentioned and I almost predicted why. The red herrings weren't even interesting.
posted by archimago at 5:11 AM on May 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed this movie, even if every twist was predictable and even with some of the truly bizarre editing choices (fast motion in the final confrontation?!), it was a thoroughly enjoyable weird pastiche with some great performances
posted by dis_integration at 5:59 AM on May 21, 2021

I felt there weren't nearly enough ham-fisted masturbation jokes in the Trixie & Katya watch. I mean, pussy licking fish fingers? It was low-hanging plums.
posted by chavenet at 7:35 AM on May 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

This bonkers movie was, for me, fun to watch. And even more fun to talk about.

That weird sequence with the French language tutoring thing? Her bizarre hostility toward it, yet she keeps using it? The overly-cgi apple overtaking the screen? Like, what's up with that?!

But I am re-thinking "fun," because basically everyone is a trauma victim or haunted or dealing with something painful.

Does this movie offer great answers about the origins of and answers to the characters' ways of dealing with their trauma? Absolutely not.

It might even be irresponsible about all that. The story of its troubled path to "final draft status" is at least partly to blame, I'm sure. I don't know the source material, so I can't speak to that.

In any case, the Julianne Moore set-piece is utterly fantastic. Two people desperate to connect, by turns careless of and coy with boundaries. She and Amy Adams create such a fascinating dynamic there.

Also, consider Amy Adams. I first saw her in Junebug, where she inhabited a role in a way that took my breath away. A couple of years after that, she did Enchanted. The year after, Doubt. Lots of others! Arrival, in which she played the same character in two timelines, and opposite Jeremy Renner, which could not have been super-inspiring. I think she can do anything.
posted by Caxton1476 at 7:44 AM on May 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Articles like this illuminate film criticism and the problems I have with it. I get that this is his theory of the case but where is the director? The actors? One would think that if this was really the set up for the film, a meta on meta film study...any one of them would be talking about it. An actor, I imagine, beyond a payday would like nothing more than to play a part in the sort of film that is described by the critic. There would be joy in talking about that kind of film.

I don't see a goblet, I see two ladies kissing.
posted by zerobyproxy at 8:54 AM on May 21, 2021

Ideefixe: "The “critic” seems to want to impress readers with all the films and directors he’s heard of."

It's sort of a critic's job to know those, wouldn't you think?
posted by octothorpe at 2:34 PM on May 21, 2021

I felt there weren't nearly enough ham-fisted masturbation jokes in the Trixie & Katya watch. I mean, pussy licking fish fingers? It was low-hanging plums.

I think they're so comfortable with each other, and their stan audience knows them so well, that it basically went without saying.
posted by supercres at 3:55 PM on May 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm willing to try The Woman in the Window, but I am eager to watch more of Trixie and Katya.

I can't tell if this means (a) Who are these two beautiful women? I must see more! or (b) I've seen this pair's thousand hours of content and I'm jonesing for more.

If it's (a), I have excellent news for you, and here, and of course where it all began
posted by supercres at 3:58 PM on May 21, 2021

[the film] has Amy Adams’s unwell Anna suspicious that her neighbor (Gary Oldman) killed his wife (Julianne Moore) and replaced her with a double (Jennifer Jason Leigh)

They should've cast Bridget Fonda in the wife role.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:38 PM on May 21, 2021 [4 favorites]

The un-well psychiatrist is a bit of a trope in NYC lore (or certainly was.) Yet this isn't depicted as quirky, plot-point illness (for the most part) but real, sad debilitating illness. Everyone is kind of fucked up - as in, that is the sum of their identity (angry banker, parole-breaking tenant with anger issues, and the son - now there's a stereotype I haven't seen in ... since maybe the 70's?)

Everyone acts the hell out of their respective roles though - like, wow. In that sense it really is a B-movie in the best sense, a bit tossed off and a bit brilliant. Adams' and Moore's scenes are terrific - really surprising and lively and unexpected. Watching it I thought of the first time I saw Moore, in "Uncle Vanya on 42nd St."

I'll probably watch this again at some time, despite the last twist, there's a lot in it that is really good, and against the clunky, dumb script it's interesting. It's a bit surprising Netflix's crazy drive for more and more content hasn't resulted in more good-bad movies.
posted by From Bklyn at 6:31 AM on May 22, 2021

They should've cast Bridget Fonda in the wife role.

I guess she's never going back to acting. It's been twenty years since her last role.
posted by octothorpe at 6:42 AM on May 22, 2021

The way Wikipedia lays it out, it sounds like she got in a big car crash after her last most recent role, married Danny Elfman, then had a kid with him who would now be 16. So, she might just be having a life.
posted by rhizome at 11:10 AM on May 22, 2021

It may not have been a serious suggestion. In light of the discussion of a movie based largely on references to other movies, with a plot that includes Jennifer Jason Leigh impersonating a man's wife, it seems like a missed opportunity to cast someone in a well-known movie where Jennifer Jason Leigh impersonates a man's fiancé.
posted by kirkaracha at 4:46 PM on May 22, 2021 [1 favorite]