The film was due to arrive in October of the next year, delayed another year after Disney acquired Fox, then sold to Netflix during the pandemic, with the release date finally landing in May 2021.
Finn living in New York City who believes she’s witnessed a horrible crime across the street while spying on her neighbors’ home.
“The picture is enjoyable not so much for its twisty plot—which, even if you haven’t already read the book, is essentially pretty guessable—as for its artful dedication to its own highly theatrical, drapes-drawn somberness,” wrote TIME critic Stephanie Zacharek in her review for TIME.
As the movie’s release stokes curiosity about the origins of the thriller and brings Mallory’s scandalous past back to the forefront, here’s what to know about The Woman in the Window, its quick rise as a successful thriller and the downfall of its once-celebrated author.
Though many critics noted how Finn’s novel neatly fit into this category of fiction, particularly with his inclusion of an unreliable female protagonist, they also applauded the somewhat deeper dive he took into his main character’s psyche and her agoraphobia.
‘The Woman in the Window’ is first-rate entertainment that is finally a moving portrait of a woman fighting to preserve her sanity.” For the New York Times Book Review, Janet Maslin wrote that the book would surely hook readers, but it still had plenty of issues.
His anonymity did not last long—in 2016 while the auction for The Woman in the Window was underway, bidders learned of his real name and, according to an exposé by Ian Parker published in the New Yorker in 2019, many publishing houses dropped out.
Others were critically concerning, chief among them: that his mother died of cancer, his brother committed suicide, and that Mallory himself had a brain tumor.
The allegations in the exposé were numerous and, in some cases, outlandish: former co-workers described finding cups of urine in Mallory’s boss’ office.
A spokeswoman for William Morrow said that Mallory had outlined his novel with the “main plot points” before the release of Saving April—and Mallory himself said he began writing the book in the summer of 2015.
And this may be why the story of Dan Mallory is so fascinating: It feels like the simplest example of the art/artist dichotomy and the ethical dilemma of bringing wealth to bad people by patronizing their artwork.” Others placed blame on the publishing industry for allowing his behavior to persist.
Debate continued over the importance of a novelist’s identity, and how Mallory’s situation was different than, say, James Frey, the infamous author behind A Million Little Pieces, who lied about the events in his memoir .
While Mallory continues to be offline , there are plans beyond The Woman in the Window film to bring his story to the screen—not the one he wrote, but the one he lived.
Producer Scott Rudin, who was the subject of a recent exposé about his abusive behavior, took over and hired screenwriter Tony Gilroy to write reshoots, but the material still tested the same way, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
It seems right—not to mention ripe for memes—that a movie about a woman who is desperately afraid of the outdoors is arriving just as most of the U.S.