Even before its release, there was something of a smell coming off Netflix’s psychological thriller “The Woman in the Window”.
The last film produced by the Fox 2000 Pictures label, the $40 million feature started out with some good bonafides – a strong cast, a solid director with Joe Wright (“Atonement,” “Darkest Hour”), and it was based on a best-selling novel.
Originally going to be released theatrically in late 2019, a combination of bad test screening scores requiring reworking of the film, the pandemic, and a backlog of releases following Disney’s purchases of Fox saw the movie ultimately delayed almost two years.
Ultimately it arrived via a premiere on Netflix last year where it scored utterly dismal reviews. Along with source material that borrowed tropes from many works before it from “Rear Window” to “Copycat,” it was a film that felt like it had been reworked to death.
Now, almost a year on, Wright has spoken with Vulture about the experience and how his planned vision was ultimately defeated by studio interests:
“Yeah, it was a long, protracted, frustrating experience. The film that was finally released was not the film that I originally made. It was like, ‘Oh, f–king hell. You live and you learn.’ It got watered down. It got watered down a lot.
It was a lot more brutal in my original conception. Both aesthetically, with really f–king hard cuts and really violent music – Trent Reznor did an incredible score for it that was abrasive and hard-core – and in its depiction of Anna, Amy Adams’ character, who was far messier and kind of despicable in a lot of ways.
Unfortunately, audiences like women to be nice in their movies. They don’t want to see them get messy and ugly and dark and drunk and taking pills. It’s fine for men to be like that, but not for women. So the whole thing was watered down to be something that it wasn’t.”
Part of that is due to the late 2019 test screening. Actor/writer Tracy Letts, who adapted the script, indicated in a previous interview that they shot the film they intended to make in late 2019 but after the test audience reacted badly, there were “rewrites and re-shoots that I didn’t have anything to do with”.
Wright meanwhile goes further into the original version’s editing, saying it was something much more hardcore and akin to the work of “Enter the Void” and “Irreversible” director Gaspar Noe:
“The cuts were really hard. I always think about that Gaspar Noe film, ‘I Stand Alone,’ where there’s like a gunshot on every single cut, so you were dreading him cutting at all, and it left you a complete nervous wreck.
There was something of that in ‘Woman in the Window’s cinematic style. It was brutal. It was brutalist. And would you believe it? They didn’t like it! [Laughs] I always think that people are going to get what I do and that of course it’s worth spending X amount of millions of dollars on a sort of formal experiment in fucking anxiety.
And when people go, ‘Hmmm, that’s not really what we …,’ I get surprised. I think that sort of thing is fine if you’re working with a Gaspar Noe budget. If you’re working with a Hollywood budget, it’s probably not such a clever idea.”
Then Wright was asked the big question – if the opportunity presented itself, would he have a go at re-editing the film? Turns out he’s very much up for it:
“​​I think it would cost a lot money to do because you’d have to re-edit the whole thing, regrade it, remix it. But it would be fun. I’d love to do it.”
The film scored just 26% on Rotten Tomatoes with criticisms of it being a bland overwrought thriller that looked good. Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Fred Hechinger, Wyatt Russell, Brian Tyree Henry, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Letts himself all star in the movie which remains available on Netflix.
