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.

Three Films Make A Post: The hunter becomes the hunted.

Enhanced (2019): By now, quite a few low budget filmmakers have realized that they may not be able to keep up on the spectacle of contemporary superhero cinema, but they sure as hell can use superhero tropes when focussing on comparatively low power sets and street level plots. Like at least half of these films, James Mark’s Canadian example of the type Enhanced is clearly taking its cues from the X-Men, with (mostly) innocent superpowered beings hunted by the government.

The resulting movie is a lot of fun for my tastes. It makes good use of the fantastical elements it can afford, presents some choice comic book science, and comes up with a handful of very nice, small-scale action scenes with more than decent choreography and direction. Leads Alanna Bale and George Tchortov comport themselves well in and outside of the action, too, so there’s a fun time to be had here.

Deep Cover (1992): Bill Duke’s (who is probably much better known for his character actor work than directing despite his copious direction credits on TV and in the movies) movie about a black cop played by Laurence Fishburne when we still called him Larry going undercover as a drug dealer (and partnering with Jeff Goldblum) packs a lot of style (one can certainly be sure that Duke watched Miami Vice and learned all the right lessons from the show), quite a bit of creative wildness, comments about being a black man in the 90s and a generally acerbic attitude towards 90s drug capitalism as well as the war on drugs into all the best-loved tropes you expect from a film in this genre.

With the help of Fishburne, Goldblum and a generally wonderful cast, Duke makes a film that manages to be genuinely intelligent under the cheap thrills, delivers these thrills in the best possible way, and really convinces anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that he should have been one of the great crime movie directors after this, instead of the travelling craftsman he became. (No shame in being one of those, naturally).

In the Cut (2003): Also pretty fantastic is this hazy and moody erotic psychological thriller by the great Jane Campion, who never let her feminism stop her to get deep into the less easily stomached and judged areas of sexuality, desire and lust, and indeed found much useful for feminism to explore there. This is very much a film of a hazy yet tactile mood, interested in all kinds of liminal spaces – between characters, between feelings, between glances, between waking and sleep, between lust and caution, and of course (this being Campion) between touches. The film is pretty giallo-esque in its eroticism, as well as in the deep implausibility of its thriller plot; just as it is with most other great giallos, that implausibility really isn’t the point, though.

Of course, this being a Campion movie, we also get to watch some great performances, not just by Meg Ryan going brilliantly against her America’s Sweetheart thing with ease but also by house favourites Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nick Damici (of all people to encounter in a Campion movie).

Amityville: The Awakening (2017)

Joan (Jennifer Jason Leigh), her daughters Belle (Bella Thorne) and Juliet (Mckenna Grace) and comatose son James (Cameron Monaghan) move into the Amityville House. In this parallel world, the “actual” Amityville hauntings happened, and the movies about it were made too. Still, Belle manages not to realize what the place is all about until she’s ostracized in school because of it.

That’s not the only thing that’ll make the girl’s life difficult, though: there’s clearly something wrong between her and her mother that goes beyond the kinds of tension that develop between mothers and daughters. Why, would you believe it might just have something to do with the state James is in (though not as much as the film hints at)? Then there are of course the expected variations of the usual Amityville shenanigans mostly concentrating on Belle and Juliet. Flies, the red room – you’ve seen it in another Amityville film, it’s in here in one form or the other. The most potentially frightening threat to Belle, though, is what happens to James. He should never be able to wake from his coma again, but after some time in the house, he clearly starts to regain a part of his consciousness, if not his mobility. Is it really James, though, or is his body…possessed? Well, what do you think.

Franck Khalfoun’s new film in the franchise that by now has spawned more unofficial sequels than official ones has graced studio shelves for a couple of years now, with various reports of cuts, recuts and lowered age ratings spicing up the tale. That suggests a complete train wreck of a movie, but for most of its running time, The Awakening not a bad movie so much as a painfully mediocre one that seems not to know at all what it wants to be: a generic modern mainstream ghost horror film like The Conjuring et al but with awkwardly timed jump scares and less ad space for dubious faith healers? A more interesting psychological horror film about the price a family has to pay for the poisonous mixture of love, guilt, desperation and a mother’s inability to let her son go? Some meta-horror film where characters in the Amityville house watch the original Amityville Horror (and where nothing of interest apart from a blunt scare and a half comes of that)? A film that puts teenage Bella Thorne in hot pants and bizarre skimpy outfits and leers at her as often as possible? Apart from that last one, I couldn’t help but get the impression that Khalfoun didn’t know either, which is a bit of a problem seeing he’s the director and writer of this thing.

Because the film can’t really decide what kind of movie it wants to be, or even what tone it is aiming for, the only thing it manages to achieve is to waste a lot of potential. It is not difficult at all to imagine an effective, perhaps even emotionally involving horror film with The Awakening’s basic plot, but this certainly isn’t that movie. There are so many bad decisions on display here, not just when it comes to the bland direction and the confused script. For example, why try and let as affectless an actress as Thorne carry most of the film while the usually wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh has to chew through a handful of scenes of bad dialogue and badly underwritten characterisation? And if you’re Hollywood-style afraid of middle-aged women in the lead of your film, why not at least hire a more competent actress for the lead? It’s not as if young, talented actresses were difficult to find.


Because all that’s still not quite enough to sink the film, someone involved in the production decided the best way to finish it is on a sequence that feels ripped out of a cheesy 80s Italian haunted house movie (one of the Ghosthouse films, say), and that there’s nothing that fits a bit of supernatural horror better than a finale that sees our protagonist running away from a guy with a shotgun in a scene that makes the shotgun sequence in the original Amityville Horror look subtle, exciting and clever. I have no idea what this thing is even trying to do..

Three Films Make A Post: They called it God's Country... until all hell broke loose!

Morgan (2016): Luke Scott’s film starts as a very pretty to look at SF film about a woman (Kate Mara) sent to a research facility to find out what has gone wrong with the artificial life form (Anya Taylor-Joy) they have built there, promising some exploration of what it means to be human. Alas, halfway through, the whole thing turns into a very standard AI running amok flick that’s still pretty to look at and competently directed but suffers from the banality of this approach after the film has promised something slightly more interesting.

The film wastes a fantastic cast (also including Rose Leslie, Michelle Yeoh, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Giamatti, Toby Jones and more) by not giving them much to do with their underwritten characters and caps things with a so-called twist anyone in the market for SF films will have seen coming a mile away. It’s not a terrible film, mind you, but one that wastes so much potential it might as well be one.

Siren (2016): Speaking of banal, this spin-off of bro horror mainstay series VHS by Gregg Bishop is the kind of vaguely competent monster movie with a perfectly boring script (including about one somewhat interesting idea and of course not even doing something with it) that, while not being offensively bad, just isn’t worth the time invested into watching it. There are exactly one and a half relatively memorable scenes in here, the rest of this thing is the movie equivalent of a mediocre hamburger.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994): On the other hand, there’s worse things for a film than being a burger, as is amply demonstrated by Kim Henkel’s abominable fourth and final film in the original TCM series, a film that starts out as a particularly dumb slasher movie, becomes an annoying camp fest that makes a mild-mannered boy like me think very bad thoughts about its director/writer, and finishes on whatever the hell that ending even is supposed to be, seeing as it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with the film that supposedly led up to it. If that’s the sort of thing that rings your bell, there are early career lead roles by Renée Zellweger (who is much better than the film she’s in deserves) and Matthew McConaughey (camping it up in what I can only read as an attempt at self defence) before they were famous. Apparently, both actors (or “their people”) tried to suppress this thing in a move I find even worse than the actual film.

Otherwise, don’t blame me if you watch this, for there’s really no sane reason to inflict this much pain on yourself.

Buried Alive (1990)

Clint (Tim Matheson) and Joanna (Jennifer Jason Leigh) Goodman are the kind of incompatible couple careers in marriage counselling are built on. He’s a country boy construction businessman who takes the first opportunity to drag his wife out of the city and return to his hometown even though he knows that she’s a city gal with some rather unrealistic ideas of a luxury life by heart and inclination. He wants a baby, she really rather doers not  - though he doesn’t know that. He clearly loves her, but doesn’t know her at all.

To nobody’s surprise but Tim’s, Joanna has an affair. Her lover is the sleazy physician Cort van Owen (William Atherton). Cort is rather keen on Joanna murdering her husband so they can sell his company and found a clinic for the rich and famous in LA with the gains. Or so he says. Cort’s rather pushy about the whole thing too, providing Joanna with pep talks and poison like the ugliest femme fatale you ever put eyes on. Joanna, neither the brightest nor the most stable of persons, dithers a bit, but then decides to go through with the murder. Clint goes down in an unpleasant and obviously painful manner, and things seem to go well for Joanna and Cort. Alas, during her dithering, Joanna has lost enough of the poison to not actually kill Clint but only put him into suspended animation, so Clint can make his way out of his coffin to take vengeance. A vengeance that becomes decidedly cruel once he overhears that Joanna secretly had an abortion, too.

Frank Darabont’s Buried Alive is a surprisingly nasty little film, particularly if you keep in mind it is actually a TV movie. However, if not for the very harmless sexual content and lack of blood, it’d be hard to actually realize this watching it. While the film takes place in only a handful of sets and locations, this doesn’t feel like a film not being as epic in its approach as it wants to be but rather like the sharp focus it is.

The film also doesn’t look like a TV movie, with neither film stock nor visual style of the sort you’d expect. It’s just a tight, focused and nice looking film. Sure, the plot is pretty simple and straightforward (and if you think too much about it, not terribly plausible) but Darabont treats it with so much concentration and clarity this doesn’t feel like a weakness but rather a strength, more as if we were watching an archetypal tale than a clichéd one.

The film does play a bit with its tropes too: a man, Atherton’s van Owen, has the femme (homme) fatale role in the plot, while Leigh’s Joanna is more the patsy usually played by guys like Robert Mitchum who lets herself control by him and doesn’t even stop at murder. There’s also an interesting shift in sympathy going on, with Clint’s revenge going so far it’s difficult not to sympathize with Joanna, particularly since Clint isn’t exactly innocent in the whole situation, though I’m not completely convinced the film is doing this shift on purpose. It might just be pretty damn reactionary towards abortion.

The acting’s as strong as the film deserves, with Leigh providing her role with considerably more weight than you’d expect in this set-up and Matheson unexpectedly shining when he comes back as the rather monstrous avenger, instead of just when he’s doing his usual nice (if stupid) guy bit at the start.

It’s all rather wonderful, really.