Premise: An agoraphobic woman sees a crime from her window and no one believes her.
The short story is that this movie isn't very good. It's a great example of how if you keep making a copy of a copy, you lose everything that was good about the original thing. It's easy to trace The Woman in the Window's lineage from Gone Girl. Gone Girl was an excellent dark mystery about a woman in danger. It was highly regarded and I never get tired of watching it. The Girl on the Train came a couple years later and aimed for the same appeal as Gone Girl. It was a little less successful but still dialed in enough to be fun. The Woman in the Window then tries to ape The Girl on the Train and manages to be even less effective. The problem is, each movie seems to learn the wrong lesson of what made the one before it great. Gone Girl is excellent because it's actually a dark comedy. The Girl on the Train missed that and thought the appeal with the lead woman in peril and the constant overcast setting. The Woman in the Window then thought that what people liked about the The Girl on the Train was the unreliable narrator and woman in peril rather than the fun twistiness and or the mystery and interlocking parts. God help us is someone gets inspired by The Woman in the Window. That'll end up taking place in a single room and be about a comatose woman being terrorized by a mad man for 90 minutes. No thanks.
The Woman in the Window isn't any fun. That's the most important thing. It presents itself as a Rear Window concept, in which Amy Adams entertains herself by snooping on her neighbors from the window. That's dropped pretty quickly though. It's honestly more about Adams roaming around her impossibly large house in New York that they have the audacity to call a dump. She basically sees one thing from her window and that's it. She doesn't even feel that isolated in the house, because she's constantly having visitors. The whole point of making her an agoraphobic is that she's supposed to feel trapped and impotent to do anything. Yet, every clue she needs seems to be hiding in her cavernous house, and the story keeps coming to her in the form of people stopping by the house.
This is also just a completely contrived movie. Let's take the murder itself, for example. Adams sees the murder while looking through the lens of here digital camera yet she doesn't take a picture of it. That is an insane idea to throw at an audience. She lives across the street. Just have her see it from her window or with some binoculars. Having her see it through a camera yet not take a picture, especially when she takes video and pictures at other points in the movie, is a fireable offense as a screenwriter. Even the most useless studio exec could've come up with the note "why didn't she take a picture?" And, when she witnesses the murder, she only sees Julianne Moore stabbed. It's perfectly framed so that she can't see who did it. There are windows on either side of where the killer is standing, yet they are positioned perfectly in her blind spot...I just can't with this movie.
Amy Adams looks comfortable throughout the movie. She's basically in pajamas the whole time, so I don't begrudge her taking the role. It's hard to call it a bad performance when the story requires her to make so many dumb decisions. Julianne Moore is pretty good in her few scenes. Gary Oldman is bad and underused, which is an awful combination. There is absolutely no reason he's needed for that role. Like, hire Tim Roth for the role and it's still just as bad and probably saves a lot of money. Poor Wyatt Russell is trapped in this movie. He's asked to have a different personality nearly every time he's onscreen.
The twists in the movie range from unneeded to quite bad. You know how when the villain reveals himself at the end of a movie, it's supposed to put all the pieces in place? Oh, Rosamund Pike set it all up to get back at Ben Affleck. Oh, Emily Blunt's ex-husband used her alcoholism to gaslight her? That doesn't happen in The Woman in the Window. I just ended up with more questions and plot holes. Apparently, the book clears some of those details up but not enough of them. And you know, supplemental material shouldn't be required for a movie.
Verdict: Strongly Don't Recommend
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