Shuttered thrills.

It may be a huge slab of cliché, yet sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. And you’ll be hard pressed to find a better example of this than The Woman in the Window.

With a backstory more compelling than its actual plot, The Woman in the Window’s journey to Netflix is filled with the kind of bonkers intrigue that puts what the film offers to shame. Plagued with challenges from day one, the film adaptation – based on the best-selling 2018 novel of the same name – has gone through reshoots and release-date pushbacks for the best part of two years. But that doesn’t tell half the story.

Written by senior publishing executive A. J. Finn (real name: Dan Mallory) exclusively to cash in on the success of ‘Grip Lit’ thrillers like ‘Gone Girl’ and ‘The Girl on the Train’, the author has since outed himself as a serial fabricator who has, at one point or another, lied about having cancer, affected an English accent, fibbed about receiving an Oxford PhD, and falsely claim that his brother had committed suicide. Oh yeah, and a good chunk of his novel was lifted wholesale from the aptly-titled 1995 film Copycat.

Yeah, told you it was strange. And with a convoluted backstory like that, no wonder the final product is such a shambles.

Living alone in her Manhattan brownstone apartment, agoraphobic child psychiatrist Anna (Amy Adams) spends her days heavily medicated and keeping tabs on her neighbours from a second-story window. With her days drifting by in a constant state of debilitating anxiety, Anna’s life is suddenly brought into sharp focus when the mysterious Russell family move in across the street. As the Russell’s lives begin to intrude on her own, Anna is forced to confront her fears while attempting to fix the family’s fractured relationship, however, when she witnesses a disturbing act of violence, things begin to unravel, as reality and imagination become perilously intertwined.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a good homage. Truth be told, cinema wouldn’t be what it is without its innate ability to draw from its past. That said, there are homages and then there’s whatever The Woman in the Window is doing.

Ill-judged and over-eager, the film’s decision to overload the plot with homages may have felt like a good idea at the time, yet their overabundance means they very rapidly lose all meaning. Indeed, in a classic case of start as you mean to go on, it’s mere seconds into the film when we’re hit with our first piece of heavy-handed reverence with a clip of Rear Window – a film whose presence weighs so heavily on this one that it ends up crushing it altogether.

References and call-backs can be fun and often a nice visual treat for audiences now well versed in the world of Easter eggs, yet the complete over-indulgence only works to highlight The Woman in the Window’s flaws. And, without a doubt, these flaws are aplenty, however, despite this, it would be remiss not to highlight the glimmers of light making it through the crack in the curtains.

First and foremost, it’s hard to ignore just how smart The Woman in the Window looks, and despite a sense that the film is a little too desperate to mask over its deficiencies, you have to acknowledge the lengths director Tom King has gone to in order to stand out from the crowd.

Clearly keen to show that he’s not just a hired gun, King embraces the opportunity to utilise every filmmaking trick in his book to keep things at least mildly involving. Pretentious and baffling it may be at times, however, what’s presented is at least engaging, with King’s keen visual eye keeping us guessing on the central mystery even as it starts to derail.

It’s certainly a unique visual package that King puts to us, and despite it frequently feeling like you’re watching your favourite Hitchcock film through a blender, there’s just about enough to the core mystery to keep you involved. At the very centre of The Woman in the Window is the kind of page-turning mystery that the ‘Grip Lit’ genre has thrived on yet wading through the nonsense to get to it is where the film falters.

Quite honestly, The Woman in the Window is a hot mess. Seemingly scripted by a sentient studio exec conference call, the plot consists of a barrage of random elements from many other (better) films; throwing Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography and a big blob of money-making high-concept thriller shenanigans against the window to see what sticks. Which, unfortunately, isn’t a whole lot.

Incorporating elements from many successful mid-budget thrillers of the last few decades while trying desperately to appear cine-literate by lobbing Hitchcock at us every five seconds, The Woman in the Window attempts so much yet achieves so little. As the plot bounces back and forth with little rhyme or reason, we’re offered a fractured and profoundly confusing narrative that may think it’s being clever yet winds up exhausted and hopelessly lost.

By positioning itself as a modern interpretation of Rear Window, The Woman in the Window sets itself up for a fall by highlighting its fundamental misunderstanding of what made the Hitchcock masterpiece tick. Lacking nuance, gravitas, or any significant tension, The Woman in the Window is a disappointingly hollow viewing experience; glossy and with a fair amount of style, yet completely lacking in depth.

It’s a mess not even the inimitable Amy Adams can untangle, as she, along with a stacked yet criminally underutilised cast, struggles to survive a story that drags her further under the longer it goes on. Backed up by the likes of Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, and Jennifer Jason Lee, on paper The Woman in the Window should be a win-win for Adams, yet with a character lacking coherence and a script that underserves her at every turn, she’s routinely left out in the cold. Hell, not even a couple of Captain Americas in the shape of Wyatt Russell and Anthony Mackie can rescue things.

Ultimately, the disarray behind the scenes and the woes in The Woman in the Window’s production have bled over into the film itself, resulting in an end product that certainly makes for a diverting watch, yet ends up a muddled, diet-Hitchcock mess.

Incomprehensively cluttered and drowning in feverish homages, The Woman in the Window uses an abundance of nostalgia and style to mask over its many cracks. Despite Tom King’s pretty direction and a committed performance from Amy Adams, the film falls way short of expectations. Arriving with a back story that’s infinitely more interesting than the end product, The Woman in the Window is an underbaked Hitchcock knockoff that will leave you shuttered.

The Woman in the Window is available to stream on Netflix now.