The trailer for The Woman in the Window has arrived. Adapted from the 2018 novel by A. J. Finn, the film stars Amy Adams as Dr. Anna Fox, an agoraphobic child psychologist who befriends her neighbor from across the street, Jane Russell (Julianne Moore), only to witness Jane being - seemingly - murdered in her home one night. Atonement and Hanna director Joe Wright called the shots on the movie from an adapted script by Pulitzer Prize-winning actor-writer Tracy Letts (The Post), with Gary Oldman costarring as Jane's husband and possibly a killer who's covering her death by having an imposter (Jennifer Jason Leigh) pretend to be her and telling the police Anna is mentally unwell.
Woman in the Window was originally scheduled to arrive back in October, leading some to speculate it could become the movie to finally land Adams her long-overdue acting Oscar. Then, this past summer, word broke the film was being delayed so its third act could be reworked in response to test audiences (who were reportedly left confused by its various plot twists and turns). It's since been pushed back to next spring, and is only now getting its official marketing campaign underway.
20th Century Fox dropped The Woman in the Window trailer online today, ahead of its premiere in theaters sometime over the next week. You can check it out in the space below, followed by the new poster.
Just like its source material, The Woman in the Window footage very much looks and feels like an homage to the collective work of Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window, specifically), among the many other filmmakers who specialized in murder-mysteries and psycho-thrillers of this kind throughout the twentieth century. The trailer also plays up its parallels to Gone Girl, another relatively recent Fox adaptation of a best-selling mystery-thriller book whose narrator might or might not be entirely reliable. There's less overlap (okay, a lot less) between these two stories than this preview would have you believe, but it's a smart way of promoting The Woman in the Window all the same.
At this point, though, the question is whether The Woman in the Window will be better or worse off for its third act revisions. While it's easy and not at all unfair to assume the worst whenever a film undergoes heavy tinkering in post-production, there's a chance (slight it may be) the movie's revised conclusion will be less convoluted and more impactful than the earlier version. Either way, Adams never fails to deliver as an actor, and even Wright's worst projects (sorry Pan) are still interesting messes, so there's hope yet for The Woman in the Window.
(Whether the movie will be anywhere as interesting as The New Yorker piece published about Finn earlier this year, well, that's another matter altogether...)
Source: 20th Century Fox
