The thriller, a neo-Gothic diversion with a strong central performance, has nothing to do with the coronavirus, but in the long and twisted year and a half since its original release date, the homebound protagonist has become that much more understandable to audiences.
Based on a super-popular 2018 novel and conceived as an awards contender for Fox, the Joe Wright-directed movie was caught up in the studio’s acquisition by Disney, and subjected to rewrites and reshoots after disappointing test screenings.
The final Fox 2000 production, Woman arrives on Netflix as a good-looking, mildly convoluted B movie with an A-list cast and enough red herrings to stock a deli counter.
The woman knocking around that old and subtly burnished house is Adams’ Anna Fox, who has been stricken with the extreme anxiety disorder of agoraphobia for almost a year.
If nothing else, the friction between Anna and her shrink sets the tone for all the off-the-charts anger and unpleasantness soon to arise like a toxic cloud from other figures in her orbit.
Anna’s longest encounter with any of the Russells is an impromptu night of wine and semi-confessional conversation with Ethan’s mother, Jane .
Soon Anna is channeling not just a sitcom busybody but Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, ensconced in shadow and aiming her camera’s telephoto lens at the Russells’ house.
On top of that, she’s introduced to the “real” Jane , who might be the world’s most unhappily married woman, but at any rate is a figure as suspiciously rigid as Moore’s character is suspiciously animated.
The movie, which ups the violence a bit, ends on a slightly different but no less wanting note, and never matches the nuance and intensity of Adams’ performance, with its fully alive and unpredictable guardedness, prevarication and naked emotion.
Throughout the narrative Anna is surrounded by as off-putting and tightly wound a collection of characters as has ever been assembled, and in the moment when she’s forced to face an unwelcome truth, she’s literally surrounded by them.
The idea of a seemingly unhinged woman struggling to be believed remains a viable dramatic trope, for painfully obvious reasons — the persistent realities of condescension and demonization, for starters.