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: Overlord (2018)

D-Day. The film follows a small group of soldiers who are parachuted in behind enemy lines to destroy a highly important German radar antenna at a church in a small French village. Hardly anyone survives the drop, and the handful of survivors don’t really seem to be enough to get through all of the Nazis between them and the goal of their mission. Our viewpoint character is Boyce (Jovan Adepo), somewhat looked down upon by most of his peers for being “too soft” (and one, imagines, for the colour of his skin, though the film doesn’t really go there) but who will, not surprisingly, be the film’s moral backbone. Also involved are the cynical and probably PTSD-haunted veteran of the Italian front Ford (Wyatt Russell), the group’s de facto leader after everyone else is dead (Bokeem Woodbine, we hardly knew ye), posturing sniper Tibbet (John Magaro), war photographer Chase (Iain De Caestecker), and dude with a Jewish name – that’s all the character he gets - Rosenfeld (Dominic Applewhite).

At least, they quickly meet the mandatory helpful hot French woman (Mathilde Ollivier). On the negative side, the Nazis don’t just have a radar operation going on in the village church but are also experimenting on the villagers and everyone else they can get their fingers on. Nazi zombie super soldier’s the watch word.

Julius Avery’s Overlord is a pretty peculiar movie. Going in, the film suggests some kind of pulped-up version of The Dirty Dozen with zombies, but the film’s first half turns out to be more of a harsh and ruthless war movie, with moments that feel authentically horrible, and little on screen that suggests any of the kind of brutal heroism you generally get from the more pulpy end of the war movie genre. I’m not complaining, mind you, for Avery is a rather decent hand at this sort of thing, turning out a first third that’s exciting but also not pulling any punches for the audience.

For the film’s middle part, things shift into increasingly less believable directions that feel rather more than the sort of war action movie with horror bits I had expected from Overlord going in, until the film’s final third suddenly turns its horror pulpiness up to eleven (starting with something unpleasant yet utterly silly happening to De Caestecker’s character), pumps its fist at absurd last stands, and goes all-out bonkers pulp war horror on us. The way the film handles this, this doesn’t feel like dramatic escalation but rather like someone taking the script, ripping out the second half (probably while roaring something about Nazis) and just ramming the second half of a completely different film into the director’s face. Fortunately, Avery mostly handles the last third with the right energy for the bizarre nonsense the script cooks up for him, so, even though the film doesn’t manage to be to anything like a coherent whole, what’s there is well-directed, performed by an ensemble that keep their dignity even under greatest duress, and highly entertaining.


Still, I wish I had gotten to see the second half of that ruthless war movie called Overlord, or the first one of the crazy pulp concoction of the same title instead of half of each of them.