The Woman in the Window (2021)

Warning: there will at least be structural spoilers

Child psychologist Anna Fox (Amy Adams) is going through a very rough patch. Separated from her husband and child, she is holed up in her house in New York, unable to go out due to her agoraphobia, and heavily medicated with a potent mix of psychopharmacology and alcohol. Her main hobby apart from falling down drunk while watching Hitchcock movies is watching her neighbours, all of whom seem completely oblivious to the strategic use of curtains to protect one’s privacy.

The closest actual human contact Anna seems to have is the tenant in her basement, David (Wyatt Russell), a bit of a shady character. That changes once Anna gets to know the new neighbours from across the street, the Russells. She is visited in turn by the family’s teenage son Ethan (Fred Hechinger), and his mother Jane (Julianne Moore), whose behaviour very much suggests that husband Alistair (Gary Oldman) is an abuser.

Anna can’t help but want to get involved, and once she witnesses what she believes to be the murder of Jane, she also gets the police involved. You know how that’s going to work out for her in a thriller of this type in any case, and that’s before we come to the moment when Russell introduces a completely different woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh wasted on a complete nothing of a role) as his wife. And let’s not even speak about Anna’s traumatic past and what that says about her state of mind.

For its first hour or so, I really bought into Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window as a very interesting, clever and visually satisfying variation on Hitchcock’s Rear Window that centres – as per the rules of modern revisionist thriller filmmaking – on the female experience instead of on that of a pretty shitty man played by James Stewart (who seemed to realize his characters’ shittiness in Hitchcock movies much more so than his director did, but I digress). At that point the film also recommends itself as visually schooled not only in Hitchcock but also in all the favourite colours of the giallo, and featuring a pretty insane cast circling around a great, big (this is never a film for subtlety) performance by Amy Adams. Until the hour mark, the film additionally seems to do its best to use its protagonist’s mental illness as a part of its plotting but also respect mental illness and treat it loudly but humanely.

Unfortunately, all of this is thrown out of the window at the hour mark, when the whole film turns into a real shitshow of idiot plot twists, stupid revelations and clichés about mental illness most contemporary slasher movies would think twice to use. Also there to annoy me and ruin my fun are a budding serial killer (because nothing is so great for a psychological thriller as a villain who doesn’t have much of actual psychology, apparently), and the kind of whoa, twist! plotting that gives up on everything that has been interesting before in a movie just for the cheapest and tackiest effect, pissing on established character psychology in service of the laziest plotting and storytelling imaginable (script by Tracy Letts). That the ridiculously overwrought happy end also suggests the best way to get rid of one’s trauma induced mental illness is to suffer through even more trauma does not exactly help the film’s case either.

In short: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

By now, I’m actually going into Marvel productions banking on them being at least entertaining and generally non-stupid, but I think I’m going to adjust my attitude and will from now on bank on them being really good, and can still be positively surprised when they turn out like The Winter Soldier, which is to say pretty darn great.

Of course, seeing that it’s highly influenced by Ed Brubaker’s excellent run on the comics, the last decade or so of mainstream-yet-intelligent spy movies like the first three Bourne films and the Daniel Craig James Bonds, 70s conspiracy thrillers, and – quite obviously if you look at the fights – martial arts and action cinema from all around the world (The Raid quite heavily comes to mind), and does all the right things with a character that should by all rights be a horrible jingoistic mess but nearly never becomes one, Winter Soldier seems a bit made for me. Particularly because it uses the synergy of the already established Marvel movie universe very well without running into the trap of thinking this synergy replaces the actual plotting, and knows that Captain America in this century is very much a character belonging into an ensemble. By all rights, this should be called “Captain America, Black Widow & The Falcon: The Winter Soldier”, but then, that’d be a really unwieldy title. The film really does a lot of cool and interesting things with Natasha and Sam, thanks to a script that knows how to write the personal stuff into the explosions, and actors in Scarlett Johansson and Anthony Mackie who have proven themselves highly adept at the particular acting style you need to apply in blockbuster cinema.

As a pinko commie, I’m also quite happy with the film’s politics, not because I perfectly agree with them (I’m not the kind of pinko commie who needs that to appreciate a film, fortunately), but because they are as coherent as can be expected in a film genre that can do subtlety only to a degree, and are a perfect fit for a Captain America film in 2014 that wants to stay true to the character’s origins of Hitler-punching and taking the promise of America by its word.

All these elements, as well as Chris Evans’s still note-perfect performance and many a nice nod to established comic characters, I mostly expected (or at least would have bet minor amounts of money on). What I didn’t expect is that Anthony and Joe Russo, both directors with mainly experience in sitcoms (even though one of them is the sainted and seemingly indestructible Community), were this great as action directors, with so many propulsive action sequences that also just happen to be often really cleverly and beautifully choreographed there should by all rights be not enough breath in anyone watching left to complain about them as “empty spectacle”. Which of course they aren’t – as in all good action movies, these action scenes are actually saying a lot of things about the characters the dialogue scenes don’t, all the time not just working to drive the film forward, but working as a physical connection between theme, characters and plot.

Needless to say, I’m very, very happy with the resulting movie.

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