On the whole it is formulaic to a fault.
“THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW” Rated R. On Netflix. Grade: B- “The Girl on the Train,” “Gone Girl” and now, “The Woman in the Window” — suddenly, there is a new genre sub-division of female-fronted Hitchcockian thrillers that are flashy and not very good. But they sell like proverbial hot cakes in book form, and therefore get adapted into films. The latest, a spin-off of the Hitchcock classic “Rear Window,” features an extremely unreliable female protagonist named Anna Fox (Amy Adams). Anna lives alone in a Upper West Side townhouse, taking a variety of psychoactive drugs to control her anxiety and depression, having sessions with her visiting shrink (Tracy Letts, who also adapted the screenplay), playing with her cat Punch and spying on her neighbors. Anna also stays in touch by cellphone with her husband (Anthony Mackie) from whom she is separated and her young daughter Olivia (Mariah Bozeman), who lives with her father. Anna has a tenant named David (Wyatt Russell), a tall and handsome singer-songwriter-handyman from Springfield, Mass. Instead of a professional photographer recovering from a broken leg (the James Stewart role in “Rear Window”), “The Woman in the Window” gives us Anna, a disturbed, agoraphobic child psychologist who has attempted suicide.
