Window view provides muddled perspective

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This article was published 29/01/2022 (1564 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As its unwieldy, preposition-packed title suggests, The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window is a satirical comedy. Unfortunately, it’s a satire without a point of view and a comedy without many laughs.

The eight-episode series, now streaming on Netflix, suffers from an unnecessarily stretched-out length and a tin ear for tone. It isn’t crazy enough to be fun or straight enough to thrill.

Worst of all, TWITHATSFTGITW, as we could call it, dredges up every wine-soaked trope of the domestic thriller but has surprisingly little to say about them. And that’s too bad, because this genre, which so often features an unreliable and imperiled female protagonist, could use some trenchant analysis, or at least some smart spoofing. Are these tales of woe explorations or exploitations? Are they critiquing the patriarchal power structure or just wallowing in female pain?

This story centres on a fractured female protagonist named Anna (played by Kristen Bell, who did such good comic work in The Good Place but is left stranded here). Once a successful painter, Anna is now unable to work, paralyzed by past trauma, a broken marriage and “ombrophobia,” an extreme fear of rain that often keeps her shut in the house.

She’s also consuming a risky amount of booze and pills, often to the point of blacking out, and she’s become a wee bit obsessed with her too-good-to-be-true neighbour across the street, Neil (Tom Riley), a dishy widower with a small daughter. When Anna believes she has witnessed a violent crime at Neil’s home, she can’t get anyone to believe her. Dismissed as unstable, ignored by incompetent police detectives, she must put herself in danger to find the truth.

Add in some double (triple? quadruple?) twists and a suburban setting that’s all casual cashmere, cream-coloured couches and frenemy drama at the school drop-off, and the series seems to be riffing on bestselling books like The Girl on the Train and The Woman in Cabin 10, crossed with TV adaptations like Big Little Lies and The Undoing.

There are comic exaggerations that fans of the 21st-century domestic thriller will immediately recognize. Anna gets day-drunk on glasses of red wine the size of her head. She has a habit of making – and then dropping — chicken casseroles, going through three blue-and-white Corningware dishes in the first episode alone. She reads books with titles like The Woman Across the Lake and The Girl on the Cruise.

She offers up convoluted inner monologues: “To get to the bottom of something, sometimes you have to remind yourself that if you don’t risk anything, you risk everything. And the biggest risk you can take is to risk nothing. And if you risk nothing, what you’re really doing is risking not getting to the bottom of something. And if you don’t get to the bottom of something, you risk everything.”

So what does this series get to the bottom of?

Contemporary domestic noir, often written by and for women, has roots in the 18th- and 19th-century gothic novel, as well as 20th-century examples of “the marriage thriller” by writers like Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. The recent wave was kickstarted by Gillian Flynn’s 2012 bestseller Gone Girl, with its spiky feminism and ice-cold insights into women and power.

But the market might be getting overstuffed. The Undoing, based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s You Should Have Known, was supposedly about misogynistic violence, but the 2020 HBO series seemed to get fatally distracted by Nicole Kidman’s coats. Last year’s cursed and much-delayed movie adaption of A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window was so muddled and mangled it inadvertently turned into a kind of self-parody.

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window doesn’t really tell us anything more about the genre it claims to be satirizing. And really, what can a series say about our ongoing cultural fascination with women and violent crime when it is, itself, so completely unfascinating?

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca