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The Woman in the Window , an overstuffed, floridly preposterous psycho-thriller starring Amy Adams, is the kind of movie that would love to be described as Hitchcockian. But the resemblances are cosmetic at best; really, a better term might be “Hitchcocky,” which comes closer to capturing its brand of swaggering, self-conscious homage.
A meticulously controlled frenzy of a movie, it’s less interested in reproducing Hitch’s mastery of suspense than in repurposing his most famous twists and tropes, pelting you with strenuously clever parallels to Vertigo , Psycho and the like and that’s not even mentioning the lodger, the vanishing lady or one hell of a family plot.
Director Joe Wright knows the words to “Rear Window” and “Vertigo,” but not the music
Elizabeth Weitzman | May 13, 2021 @ 4:00 PM
Melinda Sue Gordon/Netflix
A B-movie effort from an A-list production team, Joe Wright’s “The Woman in the Window” buckles beneath its aspirations almost immediately.
Wright and screenwriter Tracy Letts have adapted Dan Mallory’s bestselling novel, which at one point was notorious for plagiarism accusations. (Mallory writes under the pseudonym A.J. Finn.) And the movie itself has been laboring under a shadow of a doubt since it was shot in 2018, which now feels like a lifetime ago.
After some retooling and shelf-sitting, it was acquired by Netflix and arrives with a single overarching ambition: to be considered Hitchcock-ian. Wright telegraphs this goal as clearly as he possibly can right from the start, his camera panning past an actual shot of Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window” before sweeping up and down vertigo-inducing stairwells.