BEST ALFRED HITCHCOCK MOVIES ON NETFLIX MOVIE
The zoom-in, pullback dolly shot Hitch also made famous in that movie of nerve-inducing stairwells is likewise visually referenced in The Woman in the Window, with the stairwell in Anna’s home recreating the same high anxiety composition as a set of stairs in one of Hitchcock’s earliest films, the silent British production, Blackmail (1929).
With its slowly spiraling image of snow drops drifting in a circle through the air-an image we later learn is the last thing Anna saw before her family died-we’re retroactively reminded of the spirals that consumed the mind of Stewart’s Scottie in that film.
And it’s woven into the silver mane of hair on Oldman’s head, which intentionally echoes Burr’s sinister everyman who lives in the apartment across from Jeff’s.Įven the film’s opening shot more covertly recalls another Hitchcock classic starring James Stewart: Vertigo (1958). It’s there every time Anna spies on her neighbors through the long lens of her old school camera, which unsubtly harkens back to Stewart’s Jeff doing the same in Rear Window. In essence, it’s the same setup of Rear Window where Anna thinks her neighbor (Gary Oldman in the newer movie’s case) murdered his wife, but the accusation is clouded in doubt for even the audience since Anna is such an unreliable narrator that for two-thirds of her movie, she convinces us that she’s going through a divorce instead of grief.Īnd yet, none of these added elements distract from the fact that this movie wants to be Hitchcock, or at least the heir to what many consider to be his masterpiece. Hence the audience is asked to question everything we see in The Woman in the Window, including whether Anna really met the woman she thinks is Jane Russell (Julianne Moore) and if Jane was then actually murdered across the street. Those deaths were in turn precipitated by Anna’s own infidelities, which left her distracted while driving on an icy road. Anna Fox (Adams) is an exceedingly troubled individual, suffering from a trauma we only learn late in the story was caused by the tragic death of her husband and child. So it is that The Woman in the Window’s Dr. I have not read the book, but the bestseller clearly benefited from the boom of “grip lit” novels-thrillers often centered around the unreliable perspective of flawed female protagonists-in the 2010s. Finn, who wrote the novel the film is based on. Rather the film is taking a plethora of inspirations from various Hitch joints, and marrying that Master of Suspense ethos with a modern sensibility created by author A. The talent involved is too smart for that. Which may explain why 20th Century Studios (back when it was called 20th Century Fox) delayed the movie for reshoots, and then Disney ended up selling this otherwise incredibly polished and stylish thriller to the industry’s algorithm farm upstate: Netflix.Īdmittedly, The Woman in the Window is not intended to be a direct remake of Rear Window or any other Hitchcock picture. With a very similar premise to Rear Window-a slightly deranged New Yorker pries into the hidden lives of her neighbors- The Woman in the Window freely owns up to its influences and aspirations. During one of the film’s opening shots, the camera pans around Amy Adams’ ridiculously spacious New York City brownstone and passes a television screen that is inexplicably playing the ending to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) in slow-motion, with Jimmy Stewart wrestling against the grip of an out-of-frame Raymond Burr. It’s there in both subtle and overt ways from the very first scene. Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window is not shy about its Hitchcockian influence. This article contains The Woman in the Window spoilers.
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