The Woman in the Window (2021)

Directed by Joe Wright. Starring Amy Adams, Wyatt Russell, Fred Hechinger, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jeanine Seralles, Anthony Mackie, Tracy Letts. [R]

Overheated and off-putting mystery-thriller of heavily-medicated agoraphobe Adams living in a Manhattan brownstone. She may not “get out much,” but she still becomes involved in other people’s lives, including her moody basement tenant (Russell), a browbeaten teenage neighbor (Hechinger), his seemingly abusive father (Oldman), and the mother of the family (Moore), whose murder Adams swears she witnessed one evening, but no one will believe her. A lamentable waste of talent on both sides of the camera, shoddily packaged with visual and psychological references to much better films that came before it (chiefly, Rear Window and Gaslight). As often as not, the characters react or speak dialogue in ways that don’t fit the situation or the scenes that came before, as if the actors are each working off of different drafts of the screenplay (or a script from an entirely different movie); it’s behavior designed to fool or manipulate the audience, entirely removed from the reality onscreen, heightened or otherwise (rarely otherwise). Full of red herrings and clumsy clues/foreshadowing, some of which are annoyingly obvious—you see a skylight, you know someone’s falling through that thing eventually—along with a raft of wonky camera shots that suggest the work of a studied novice eager to go for broke without a dissenting voice of restraint, even though director Wright and photographer Bruno Delbonnel are both experienced enough to have known better. Shot in 2018, but the release was delayed multiple times because of poor test screenings and the COVID-19 pandemic. Adapted from a novel by A. J. Finn.

30/100