A Bad Movie Gets Worse

Let’s talk about shredding the remainder of your goodwill.

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[Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for The Woman in the Window]

The Woman in the Window is not a great film. Its twists are obvious; its characters are dull; it wants to be in the vein of a Hitchcockian thriller without really adding or commenting on that style of movie; and it wastes a top-notch cast. And yet it still kind of keeps its head above water by approaching the interesting angle that voyeurism is a form of escapism and that when we look outside for our lives into other people’s business, we’re also running away from our own problems. You can see this as Anna (Amy Adams) refuses to examine her own guilt and trauma over driving her family off a cliff and killing her husband and daughter. Anna has retreated so far from the world that she’s also retreated from reality, and the film’s natural endpoint feels more like her realization that her husband and daughter are dead. That’s the arc of going from delusion to acceptance, and while it may not be a flashy conclusion for a thriller, it would at least feel honest.

Instead, at the climax of the film, The Woman in the Window says that Anna was right the whole time, and that neighbor boy Ethan (Fred Hechinger) is a murderous psychopath who really did kill the woman Anna thought was Jane Russell (Julianne Moore). And he’s not a regular person who flew into a moment of tragic rage; he just likes watching the light go out of people’s eyes as they slowly die because why make him a person who’s genuinely suffering when you could make him a generic sociopath? Then there’s a big fight between Anna and Ethan who finishes killing poor David (Wyatt Russell) before chasing Anna to the roof, slamming a garden trowel in her face, and then he falls through the glass canopy to his death.

Is this ending “thrilling”? I suppose in so far as “things are happening.” But it’s also a complete betrayal of any kind of thematic and emotional base the film had built thus far. Anna’s arc isn’t completed by defeating Ethan (which is also kind of another level of betrayal because she’s a child psychologist who basically throws him off a roof); it’s just a resolution to a mystery that was never all that important beyond illuminating Anna’s disconnect from reality. So either she has to come back to reality or she never left it, and The Woman in the Window wants to have it both ways where she has to accept that her family is dead but also she was right-on that Jane Russell #1 was murdered; she simply had the wrong suspect.

The Woman in the Window had a chance to work against the voyeurism of its premise to go for something more interesting about mental health, and instead it chooses to betray that mental health by arguing that while we should sympathize with Anna, Ethan is just crazy and has to die before he kills again. This also illuminates the film’s central problem of not knowing if it’s a prestige drama where you acknowledge mental illness and trauma as real things that take work to understand or if you want to be a trashy thriller where there’s a psychopath on the loose who might impale your face with a gardening tool. The Woman in the Window never figures out which one it wants to be, so it tries to do both and ends up failing completely.

KEEP READING:Screenwriter Tracy Letts Says Working on ‘The Woman in the Window’ “Kinda Sucked”