The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window Review

Netflix's The Woman in the House Across the Street... is a lukewarm lark that could afford to be wackier and weirder.

The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window
Photo: Colleen E. Hayes

What’s both most striking and most frustrating about Netflix’s The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window is that the series largely plays it straight. A sendup of American psychological thrillers like The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, and The Woman in the Window, it features the sort of winking title that sets the bar very high on the absurdity scale. But director Michael Lehmann and series creators Rachel Ramras, Hugh Davidson, and Larry Dorf settle for a less-than-biting buffoonery to highlight what they see as the nonsensicality of these psychological thrillers.

The end result is a self-aware satire that only moderately lampoons films like David Fincher’s Gone Girl, which are often knowingly absurdist in their own right. While poking fun at the sort of outlandish tropes and overzealous twists that inspire no shortage of giddy guffaws, The Woman in the House can, oddly, be so tepid and modest in its ambitions, at least compared to the sensationalized stories that it’s trying to ridicule, that the series has a hard time justifying itself over the course of its eight half-hour episodes.

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After a devastating divorce and terrible tragedy that resulted in a debilitating—wait for it—fear of rain, Anna (Kristen Bell) is a once-renowned painter who’s prone to overindulging in wine, prescription medication, and an overactive imagination. Filling her days with worried, drunken thoughts spurred by the sights outside her spacious window, the artist is delighted to meet her handsome new neighbor, a widower named Neil (Tom Riley), and his precious daughter, Emma (Samsara Leela Yett). Tensions mount, however, when Anna witnesses—from the titular window, naturally—something sinister happening next door. As she plays detective, the would-be sleuth discovers that she can’t trust anyone, not even herself.

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If the viewer had no awareness of what The Woman in the House was about outside of its overlong title, it might be easier to appreciate the lengths that it goes to in order to at least tip its hat to the obviousness of its inspirations. But the climb to the payoff is nearly as long as the name of the series, as its humor is ultimately too drawn-out and inconsistent. Still, it earns some chuckles throughout, particularly with the preposterous backstory behind Anna’s greatest personal heartbreak, which is revealed in subsequent episodes, and the bonkers finale at least delivers on the daffy promise of the long-winded title.

Bell is admirably committed to series’s dry tone, but in the right moments, she indulges in a few well-timed bits of outlandishness. As in Lifetime’s A Deadly Adoption, which was also produced by Will Ferrell’s Gloria Sanchez Productions, the filmmakers clearly appreciate the genre that they’re caricaturizing, but The Woman in the House only occasionally finds the right balance between laughing at well-worn genre tropes and indulging in them. The end result, then, is a lukewarm lark that could afford to be wackier and weirder in order to justify being in the same conversation as the films that it’s mocking.

Score: 
 Cast: Kristen Bell, Tom Riley, Samsara Leela Yett, Mary Holland, Shelley Hennig, Christina Anthony, Cameron Britton, Benjamin Levy Aguilar, Michael Ealy  Network: Netflix

Will Ashton

Will Ashton is a freelance entertainment writer based in Pittsburgh, PA. He studied journalism and film at Ohio University, and his writing can be found in a variety of print and online publications, including Slate, Indiewire, Insider, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, CinemaBlend, and Collider. He also co-hosts the weekly film review podcast, Cinemaholics, alongside Jon Negroni.

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