100 min | R | May 14, 2021 | Netflix
An agoraphobic woman drinks too much wine, watches her neighbors through the glass, and swears she sees a murder across the street. Nobody believes her. Neither will you.
Anna Fox is a child psychologist who cannot leave her house. Agoraphobia keeps her trapped in a Manhattan brownstone with red wine, prescription pills, and old movies playing on the television. She watches her neighbors through a camera lens. One night she sees a woman stabbed across the street, and then the police tell her the victim is alive and well. The film wants to be Rear Window for the age of the unreliable narrator. It mistakes confusion for suspense.
Amy Adams plays Anna with full commitment to the unraveling. She drinks, she trembles, she presses her face to the glass and doubts her own eyes. Her work is the only element that treats the material seriously. Gary Oldman plays Alistair Russell as a wall of barely contained menace and gives the part more weight than the writing earns. Brian Tyree Henry brings a flicker of human patience to Detective Little. Fred Hechinger plays the Russell son Ethan as a nervous, watchful boy, and the rest of the cast moves through the plot like furniture the camera keeps rediscovering.
Joe Wright directs with the restless visual appetite that defines his costume dramas, and here the style fights the story. The camera glides up staircases and pushes through ceilings, the focus racks between foreground and background, and the brownstone becomes a maze of reflections. Tracy Letts adapts the A.J. Finn novel into a screenplay that keeps explaining what the audience already suspects. The editing chops between Anna’s hallucinations and the classic thrillers playing on her television until the references crowd out the tension. The production design drowns the house in noir reds and deep blacks, but the mood never hardens into menace. Wright composes individual frames with care and assembles them into something inert.
The pieces of a good thriller are all present. A trapped narrator, a crime nobody else can confirm, a house full of secrets, and a cast that could carry far better material. The film borrows so heavily from Hitchcock and his imitators that it forgets to build suspense of its own. Every twist arrives pre-explained and every shock lands soft. Amy Adams reaches for a real performance inside a film that does not know what it wants to be. The homages pile up until there is nothing left underneath them.