The basic version of this is that it's Rear Window - so overtly so that in one scene, a giant flatscreen TV is showing a clip from that film, blurry in the foreground, and for some reason advancing frame by frame rather than playing at full speed ( Spellbound also cameos, as does the non-Hitchcock film Laura, and every time it comes across as an embarrassingly desperate appeal to authority). As for what they decided to do, basically it was everything: instead of being a nice piece of nasty little trash, the movie is the sprawling, extraordinarily polished super-trash that can only happen from talented people exercising literally no discipline and just hammering at the material from every possible angle, leading to something that feels far more unhinged and genuinely insane than the honest pulp version of this material would have done.Īt the very least, it's memorably sloppy. For all I know, the version test audiences saw was even more bizarre and unacceptable than what we now all get to stream in boggle-eyed disbelief at any rate, the final cut of The Woman in the Window certainly feels like something that got overworked in the editing room and ended up like a tough piece of badly burned meat in the process. Which if nothing else is a good home for it, because if there's any company in the contemporary American film landscape that knows how what to do with terrible thrillers made with inexplicably overqualified casts.Īnd that gets us to the punchline of all of the above, since whatever the creators of this film decided to do to work their way around the garish twists and turns of the story, it didn't work. It then became a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic, ending up missing its second release date by over a year before Fox 2000 Pictures, as the final act of its existence before being shuttered by its corporate overseers at the Walt Disney Company, dumped it off on Netflix. The Woman in the Window was meant to come out in October 2019, but it tested so extraordinarily badly that the release was delayed over half a year to accommodate extensive re-editing. Finn, the pen name of Daniel Mallory, a book editor who very openly described how the book came about as a compendium of every trope in popular post- Gone Girl crime fiction, making it less an act of artistic inspiration than an accounting project * - the challenge becomes, how is a filmmaking team to make an actual movie of it? Leaning into the trashiness would probably be the best choice, but The Woman in the Window closed off on that option early on, assembling what looks on paper like one of the best cast and crews that any piece of 2019 Oscarbait could possibly daydream about having. When confronted with a story as vigorously trashy as the one underlying The Woman in the Window - adapted from the 2018 novel by A.J.
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