IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

Netflix's 'The Woman in the Window' looks at an unreliable narrator and the drugs behind that

Amy Adams stars in a film that is as much a "Rear Window" knock-off as a recreation of the side effects of trying to find the right psychiatric medication.
Image:; Amy Adams as Anna Fox in \"Woman in the Window.\"
Amy Adams as Anna Fox in "Woman in the Window."Melinda Sue Gordon / Netflix

In some ways, Joe Wright’s neo-noir “The Woman in the Window” — out on Netflix on Friday — is a wish-fulfillment flick for people trying to make their brains cope with any disturbing reality. Many of us have had to answer the question, "What if everything actually was as bad as it feels?" over the last year, as a global pandemic and political destabilization have conspired to flatter anyone with paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety or depression. I’m not really catastrophizing if it turns out that there’s a catastrophe, am I?

In the film, Anna Fox (Amy Adams) is confined to her vast brownstone — that part feels familiar — by her anxiety, and her only regular companions are a pretty long-haired cat named Punch and a suspicious downstairs tenant named David (Wyatt Russell, a former minor league hockey goalie). As a pediatric psychiatrist herself, Fox has a hard time being reined by her doctor (Tracy Letts, who also wrote the screenplay). She’s constantly second-guessing his prescriptions and ignoring his medical edicts — especially against drinking, though it's known to interfere with the effects of the medications she's on. When she's not doing that, she's wondering on the phone to her estranged husband, Ed (Anthony Mackie) whether he’s too controlling as he tries to help her challenge her own agoraphobia.

Wright and Letts have made one of the more interesting movies to successfully recreate the disorienting side effects of trying to find the right psychiatric medication. The pair don’t merely come up with good metaphors for the visually interesting disorientation of being on drugs, they also recreate the cascading panic that ratchets up another notch every time one’s brain resets to its old, miserable — but at least familiar — self. And, they keep asking how, exactly, Anna’s blighted perceptions map onto something really weird that’s going on right in front of her.

He colors our perceptions with Anna’s perceptions, and makes us doubt ourselves the same way we doubt her.

I have a little experience with this: About five years ago, I started taking medication for a depression severe enough that my doctor and I decided to add an antipsychotic prescription to my antidepressant regimen and see how it went. It went swimmingly, which is to say that, about half an hour after taking the pill, I felt like I was swimming next to five or six other men, who were also me. It also messed with my perception of time, disorienting and frightening me and, out of some kind of lizard-brain form of self-preservation, I went to sleep and woke up not exactly refreshed, but at least not several different people. (I stopped taking that drug.) It’s something that happens to Anna several times during “The Woman in the Window” and is instantly recognizable to anyone else who's experienced it.

So when Anna witnesses a horrible crime through the lens of her camera and sets about trying to keep her neighbor’s troubled son, Ethan (a fantastic Fred Hechinger), safe from its perpetrator, it feels right that she also spends the whole time wondering whether she’s getting things badly wrong.

It’s a classic film noir device, and the character is a clever foil to the protagonists of the Alfred Hitchcock movies that Wright and Letts deliberately evoke, both by using the plot devices of "Rear Window" and even by having Anna watch his movies — including that one — to pass the time that, because of her anxiety, seems to stretch out to infinity.

Wright and Letts have made one of the more interesting movies to successfully recreate the disorienting side effects of trying to find the write psychiatric medication.

Hitchcock’s mentally ill characters, though, were often helpless victims of their diseases — whether the amnesiac psychiatrist John Ballantyne in “Spellbound,” Norman Bates' being driven to crazed extremes in “Psycho,” or Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound, paranoid L.B. Jefferies in “Rear Window.”

Anna is, of course, more Jefferies than Bates — aloof, a little imperious and maddeningly confident in herself despite living at the whims of her sickness. She's a shaky, unreliable narrator, but she's the only one we have.

One of Wright’s most compelling techniques is the way he merges sound and soundtrack: It’s not always clear whether Anna is listening to certain sounds or they’re part of Danny Elfman’s score. He colors our perceptions with Anna’s perceptions, and makes us doubt ourselves the same way we doubt her, meaning that you can probably make it through most of this movie without seeing what’s coming.

[Mild spoilers ahead]

By the end, of course, Anna’s fears have been externalized, she’s fought them with a kitchen knife and won, and she’s able to say goodbye to her house and all its ghosts. I suppose you can call that unrealistic wish-fulfillment, but it’s also pretty cathartic: Anna wins out over debilitating illness in a fists-flying brawl. It’s the kind of simple answer you long for at 2 a.m., disoriented and annoyed — Who do I have to fight to get some sleep around here?

Maybe I’ll just put the movie on again.