Starring Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Anthony Mackie, Wyatt Russell, Tracy Letts, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brian Tyree Henry, Fred Hechinger

(4-Bad Film)

Clumsy. Butchered. Gaudy.

Anna Fox: You don’t think it’s paranoid if I wanna change the locks. Do you?

Who would have thought that a film written by Pulitzer-prize winner, Tracy Letts, directed by Joe Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Hanna), and starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman, among others, could be this bad? I’ve read the book; a bestseller and a skillfully written page-turner. Following a former child psychologist, Anna Fox (Adams), agoraphobic after a family accident, who sees, or at least thinks she sees a violent murder across the street, The Woman in the Window is an excellently paced, diverting, and satisfying novel. Its adapation, despite a strong performance from Amy Adams, is clumsy, suspenseless, silly, and dull. I know that the film’s release was hit hard by last year’s covid outbreak, but did something happen during production as well? It’s an inexplicably bad movie. The characters are ill-defined. The cops are useless. The dialogue is full of exposition, and I’m not sure any of it makes sense. Had I not read the book, I don’t know that I’d follow what happened in the film. I probably wouldn’t care.

-Walter Tyrone Howard-

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