The Woman in the Window is a 2021 psychological thriller directed by Joe Wright, the man behind Atonement and Darkest Hour, from a screenplay by Tracy Letts, based on A.J. Finn's bestselling novel. It stars Amy Adams as Anna Fox, an agoraphobic woman who hasn't left her home in some time, passes her days watching the family across the street through her window, and becomes convinced she has witnessed a crime. If that premise sounds familiar, it should, it's a modern reworking of Hitchcock's Rear Window. The supporting cast is genuinely stacked, with Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Tyree Henry all turning up, even if the film doesn't give most of them nearly enough to do.

Let me lead with the obvious, because it's the whole reason I'm recommending this. If anyone ever tries to tell me Amy Adams can't act, I'll happily book them a quiet room with padded walls, because her work here is extraordinary. She holds this entire film together through sheer force of will, delivering a performance so committed, so layered, and so internally alive that she single-handedly elevates everything around her. Anna's fear, her grief, her growing uncertainty about her own mind, all of it lands because Adams sells it completely. She is the gravity the whole film orbits.

Now, I want to be honest, because I'm not interested in pretending this is a perfect movie. It isn't. I went into it having deliberately read no reviews and no reactions, and even so I could sense this was a film destined to be disliked by a lot of people. It has real, noticeable problems. But here's the crucial distinction: not a single one of those problems is Amy Adams. Every flaw I bumped into traced back to either a lazy stretch of script or a shaky directorial decision, never to her performance.

And as it happens, my instinct was well-founded, because this film had a notoriously difficult journey to release. Shot back in 2018, it suffered poor test screenings, prompting late rewrites and reshoots, then endured a string of delays before being sold off to Netflix. The director has since openly acknowledged that the final cut was watered down from his original vision, and pointed to exactly that as the reason for its frosty reception. That context matters, because it confirms what watching it already told me: the weaknesses here are structural, baked in by studio interference and post-production tinkering, not by the person carrying the whole thing on screen. It's also worth noting that even the critics who disliked the film tended to single out Adams as its clear highlight, which tells you everything about where the fault actually lies.