Reel Entropy

3/10 The Woman in the Window releases on Netflix May 14, 2021, almost a year to the day after its planned May 15, 2020 release date. The COVID-19 crisis both ruined its theatrical release and ruined the movie itself, which concerns a woman who cannot leave her house, but it may have been ruined well in advance.

104 W. 121st St. in Harlem, autumn- Anna Fox (Amy Adams), a psychologist who is so agoraphobic she faints from fright whenever she leaves her house, languishes, watching old movies and drinking too much wine. Obsessed with the outside world she cannot access, she becomes concerned with the Russell family that moves in across the street, befriending the wife, Jane (Julianne Moore), who saves her house from an egging on Halloween night. Soon after, Fox sees Jane Russell murdered through her window, but when she calls the police, she’s shocked to learn that Jane Russell (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an entirely different woman, is perfectly fine. She becomes suspicious of the husband, Alistair (Gary Oldman).

The path from cerebral, woman-centered mystery-thriller Oscarbate with an all-star cast in the distinct vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train was necessarily a long one. COVID-19 was the second disaster to force The Woman in the Window to reschedule. After acquiring Fox, which had secured the rights to the film two years before the book it was based on even hit shelves, Disney pulled it from its Oct. 4, 2019 release due to poor test screenings. After re-editing and another delay because of the pandemic, Disney is distancing itself from the title more than it has from others it inherited from Fox, hawking it to Netflix instead of releasing it on either of its streaming services.