The Woman in the Window by Joe Wright, played by a very rich cast consisting of Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Julianne Moore, is available from Friday 14 to all subscribers to the streaming on demand platform Netflix.
Based on the novel of the same name by AJ Finn, The woman in the window is a clear reinterpretation of the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Window on the Courtyard, but reinterpreted in a psychological key: the protagonist, agoraphobic, is holed up in her apartment due to a profound trauma – the death of her husband and daughter in a car accident while she was driving – and given her mentally unstable condition the film – and the other characters – will enjoy continually questioning her interpretations of the events.
But at the end of the film, after the villain is killed and Anna’s story definitively confirmed, the narrative leaps forward by nine months. In this way, viewers discover that, in addition to physical injuries, the protagonist has finally recovered from her agoraphobia as well. This change, also passed from the cathartic fight with the killer that took place on the roof (and therefore outside the house) is explained by the woman’s acceptance of the origin of her trauma – having caused the death of her family – which for the whole the course of the film she had tried to conceal from herself as well.
The final scene of The woman in the window, in which Anna says goodbye to the house that had become her prison, both physical but above all psychological, suggests that her agoraphobia was linked not so much by a fear of the outside world as by fear of losing the spiritual connection she had with her husband and daughter: in that apartment, in fact, he could continue to pretend that his family was still alive but elsewhere and easily reachable through a simple phone call. Outside those walls, from those windows, the truth to be accepted was another.
Moving house can be interpreted as an act of forgiveness towards herself, after which Anna is finally freed.