Amy Adams Commits to Wannabe-Hitchcock Thriller

A B-movie effort from an A-list manufacturing crew, Joe Wright’s “The Woman in the Window” buckles beneath its aspirations virtually instantly.

Wright and screenwriter Tracy Letts have tailored Dan Mallory’s bestselling novel, which at one level was infamous for plagiarism accusations. (Mallory writes underneath the pseudonym A.J. Finn.) And the film itself has been laboring underneath a shadow of a doubt because it was shot in 2018, which now seems like a lifetime in the past.

After some retooling and shelf-sitting, it was acquired by Netflix and arrives with a single overarching ambition: to be thought-about Hitchcock-ian. Wright telegraphs this purpose as clearly as he presumably can proper from the beginning, his digital camera panning previous an precise shot of Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window” earlier than sweeping up and down vertigo-inducing stairwells.

We’ve additionally bought a Stewart-like protagonist in Dr. Anna Fox (Amy Adams). Anna is a psychologist and beginner photographer caught inside her household’s cavernous Harlem brownstone, as a result of trauma-induced agoraphobia and anxiousness. We don’t know why she’s so susceptible, however we do get clues from her weekly remedy classes (with an avuncular Letts) and strained calls together with her separated husband (Anthony Mackie) and younger daughter (Mariah Bozeman).

Anna has little else to do however to scrub down a seemingly countless provide of medicines with merlot and to observe some new neighbors transfer in throughout the road. Their tentative teenage son, Ethan (Fred Hechinger, “News of the World”), stops by first to say hi there, adopted by his mom, Jane (Julianne Moore). Though Anna nonetheless can’t go outdoors, it does look like progress to obtain pleasant guests.

But then — whereas searching her entrance window — Anna sees Jane violently murdered by Ethan’s dad, Alistair (Gary Oldman). Only…does she? When she asks the police to analyze, a baffled Detective Little (Brian Tyree Henry) introduces her to Jane, who’s completely nice. And Alistair, as one would anticipate, is hardly happy about being accused of homicide.

Still, one thing’s not proper. For one factor, Ethan is clearly making an attempt to guard his dad whereas hinting at ominous doings. For one other, Anna’s tenant David (Wyatt Russell) is changing into much less affable and extra threatening by the day. Also, there’s the unavoidable incontrovertible fact that Jane is now being performed by Jennifer Jason Leigh as a substitute of Julianne Moore.

What’s a lady to do, when no person believes her? In Anna’s case, she wanders by means of her shadowy home in a state of fixed torment, as Danny Elfman’s neurotic rating and Bruno Delbonnel’s off-kilter camerawork amp each second as much as perpetual peril and confusion.

The most admirable high quality about your entire manufacturing is its near-universal degree of dedication. Adams, specifically, is so devoted to this character that she very practically holds the movie collectively. We do really feel for Anna, who’s so honest and troubled that she trembles on the slightest gust of wind. And — as a result of the sound division can be working onerous — there all the time appear to be gusts of wind, or disquieting sirens, or threatening shouts outdoors her door. Similarly, costumer Albert Wolsky (“Birdman”) has put collectively a noticeably bleak assortment of outsized pajamas and robes for Anna to put on as she wanders her drafty hallways in an growing state of degradation.

But if the scaffolding of suspense is overly ostentatious, precise help stays oddly elusive. Each of the opposite actors on this high-toned solid is just allowed one or two major scenes, and most of them deliver a lot power into Anna’s enervated life that the movie deflates significantly as soon as they’re gone. (The essential exception is a weirdly clean Leigh who, Hitchcock-ian title apart, appears to have wandered onto the flawed set.)

The scenes with an empathetic Henry, specifically, trace at a stronger path. Had Wright and Letts centered…