How "The Woman In The House Across The Street From The Girl In The Window" Perfectly Made Fun Of Modern Psychological Thrillers
To kick things off, I have something to admit: I absolutely did NOT realize this show was meant to be a parody when I first watched it. No joke, I chose it because I'm 1,000% in that group of people who voraciously watch (somewhat overdramatic) Girl/Woman thrillers unironically.
For me, they're akin to an excellent beach read: something you use to fill your time by filling your mind with beautiful yet tragic imagery and your body with a twinge of adrenaline. While I won't necessarily brag to my intellectual colleagues about my captivation with the drama, I cannot deny that I'm innately drawn to it.
So when I clicked on The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window, I genuinely thought I was in for an evening of suspenseful entertainment — which, to be fair, I was; it just wasn't going to be the typical journey I'm used to in that realm.
Admittedly, the title should have clued me in a bit more than it did. I really looked over at my boyfriend and said, "LOL, I love the hilariously long title for some reason; it just fits the vibe." Little did I know that was the vibe — hilarity, mixed with genuine thriller-like aspects.
Warning: Spoilers ahead!
So the creators — Rachel Ramras, Hugh Davidson, and Larry Dorf — hit the nail on the head with the title of this satire, but would you believe that I still didn't get it was a full-on parody, even when I saw that comedic actor Kristen Bell was the lead?
Despite her proclivity for witty comedy in her career, I've seen Bell deliver captivating, heartbreaking, dramatic, and enticing acting while performing in one of her most famous shows, The Good Place. While the hit NBC program is packed with joke after joke, the series includes a lot of really serious topics and conversations, so I guess I went into The Woman in the House thinking it might be along those same lines.
All in all, I think it kind of was. But as I didn't realize this was a parody at first, I kept getting caught up when a joke would make its way through the drama.
For the first few opening minutes of the show, there's very little to clue you into that fact. The premise sets itself up to be very similar to The Woman in the Window, a 2021 thriller movie starring Amy Adams.
In The Woman in the Window, Adams plays a lonely woman who is stuck inside of her NYC brownstone because she's developed agoraphobia, though we don't quite know why at first.
Adams' character, Dr. Anna Fox, spends her days at home, chasing her mood stabilizers with red wine and obsessively watching the goings-on of her street — especially those of her newly arrived neighbors, the Russell family.
If there's anything we can learn from that movie, it's that if you watch for long enough, you're bound to see something that others didn't want you to know. But when Anna (Adams) witnesses a murder in the Russell home across the street from her own, no one believes her because of her mental state and abuse of drugs and alcohol. In the end, the truth of what she saw comes out, and the star sobers up and moves on with her life in a healthier way.
Well, in Bell's show, the same storyline begins to unfold as we watch her dysfunctionally do things around the house, start (and end) her days with comically large glasses of red wine, mix said wine with mood stabilizers, and occasionally talk to (and lie to) her therapist about how she's doing. The kicker is that both leads even share the same name — Anna!
But here's the thing: I genuinely thought at this point that we were just watching a sort of adaptation of The Woman in the Window. Given the same name, the same daily activities, and the copious amounts of red wine and oversized lounge clothing, I just sort of assumed the creators had made a new version set in the suburbs instead of the city.
That being said, the comedic aspects of Bell's show certainly weren't lost on me altogether; rather, I just sort of accepted them as...dark humor?
Watching a woman pour nearly overflowing glasses of red wine at 9 in the morning and slurp the top before picking it up is, well, the perfect balance of tragic and funny. Anyone slurping any kind of drink that like is funny — it just is — but the reality of what she's doing to herself is truly depressing and worrisome.
And there it is: worrisome, yet you can't help but find humor every few moments or so. That theme permeates the plot of The Woman in the House throughout, dragging you along on a journey where you aren't quite sure if you should be laughing, sad, scared, or a mixture of all three.
The real sucker punch of tragedy comes fairly early on in Episode 1 of Bell's show, though, where we painfully learn that she's having delusions about speaking with her daughter — delusions because her daughter is dead.
And just as bluntly as how I just worded that is how bluntly it's delivered in the show, which was another reason I couldn't quite decide if I should giggle or cry.
Who would giggle at the idea of a mother losing her child, you ask? Well, anyone who then gets to the explanation of how the daughter, Elizabeth, actually passed away.
In Episode 2, it's revealed that Elizabeth went with her father, a forensic psychiatrist for the FBI, to Take Your Daughter to Work Day...at the prison where he's interviewing a serial killer. Not only does she come along, she actually goes into the room with them and ends up left in there alone while her father is pulled out on an urgent matter.
But alas! The door accidentally locks them out, leaving Elizabeth trapped in a room with a serial killer who "had murdered and eaten at least 30 people." As Bell narrates the flashback, she lets us in on this killer's nickname: Massacre Mike.
The whole thing just feels unrealistic; no parent, no person, would ever leave their child in a room with a cannibalistic serial killer. Plus, the way her therapist (over the phone) cuts her off while she's talking about it truly makes it feel as if Bell's character was making up a story to avoid the pain of the real one.
The one thing that seems to be real about the story is that it was raining the day of her death, which led to Bell's Anna developing a phobia of the rain. We see this in Episode 1 when she tries to bring a casserole over to the new neighbors who just moved in but ends up collapsing in the street because it's pouring rain.
As it turns out in the end, though, Anna's story about the cannibal eating her daughter was completely true, which is just... I don't even know.
This only enforced the idea in my mind that I was watching an adaptation of Adams' film. In the movie, it's revealed that Adams' Anna developed the agoraphobia after the death of her daughter and husband. In the miniseries, Bell's Anna develops a phobia of the rain (ombrophobia, apparently) as a result of losing her daughter on a rainy day. But to be honest with myself, I should have realized that they were satirizing the whole thing because of how dramatically Bell collapses in the middle of the road.
Regardless of my ignorance, the plots of both works follow very similar storylines: The death of a child leads to phobia and depression-driven seclusion, leaving the female lead to sit around her house watching the new across-the-street neighbors' every move.
The watching of the neighbors is the main central storyline of both The Woman in the Window and The Woman in the House, though they do play out differently. In Bell's miniseries, it's a very handsome widowed father, Neil, and his adorable little girl, Emma.
In the beginning, Bell's Anna finds herself extremely attracted to this man — or rather, this man and his daughter because the idea of being with him means having a family and a child once again. But once it's revealed that he has a manipulative girlfriend, Bell starts to spiral out a little bit, though that doesn't stop her from watching everything she can see through their windows.
Just as in The Woman in the Window, Bell's Anna is enjoying an evening of mixing booze and pills while she surveils her neighbors from her living room.
She's fixated because she suspects the handsome dad's girlfriend to be up to no good (to be fair, it comes out that she was right about that). But while she's watching the girlfriend get ready across the street, she witnesses something startling.
Through the neighbor's window, Anna watches as the girlfriend writhes in pain with a slit throat before collapsing to the ground.
But of course, it's raining outside (it literally rains almost every day in this show, making Anna's life with a phobia of rain extremely hard — another clue I should have picked up on that this was a satire, but oh well), so Anna can't run over to help. Instead, she calls 911 and manically tries to report the crime. Somewhere along the way, she musters some courage and tries to run across the road to help the woman before yet again collapsing in the middle of the street.
Next thing you know, detectives are in her house accusing her of making a false report (which is a callback to The Woman in the Window). They can see the pills and booze sprawled across the living room and assume that she must have hallucinated the entire thing because, when they went to investigate, nothing appears to be wrong at the neighbor's house.
While it's perfectly reasonable to assume that a woman mixing pills and alcohol could have hallucinated, the detectives are SUPER harsh with her, and for some reason, you really want to believe Bell's Anna in this moment. Again, I still did not understand that this was a parody — I was just along for the wild ride of police being skeptical of a drunk housewife.
As Bell's Anna continues to insist that she was not hallucinating throughout the show, she basically goes on an investigative mission to prove that it must have been the handsome dad, Neil, who killed his girlfriend, Lisa. She is emphatic about being right about this, and you start to feel really bad for her as she's continually dismissed.
In a moment of desperation to prove she's right, she literally breaks into the neighbor's house to look for evidence. She ends up finding an earring on the ground and takes it to the freaking police station, somehow convinced that it proves she was killed there in the living room just like she said.
As per the theme, the lead detective dismisses her completely on the grounds that no body has been found, and it's reported that Lisa is alive and well, away at her job as a flight attendant.
The scene in the police station here is what really began to clue me in to the fact that this was a parody, though. In addition to blaming Anna's "delusions" on her drug and alcohol use, the detective brings up the loss of her daughter — in a horrifically inappropriate way. I mean, just look at what she says to her:
At this point, I had to pause the show and take a minute. "There is no way, just NO WAY, that any person, let alone a detective, would speak to the mother of a deceased child that way," I said to my boyfriend who was watching with me. This is where I started to catch onto the fact that something was up with this plot, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Why would that be written that way? Who would say it like that, so harshly? No one, that's who, and that's how I knew this wasn't your average thriller.
To my chagrin, I still didn't fully get it though! I was trying SO HARD to understand why this show was the way it was. In reality, I needed to stop thinking so hard and just start going with the flow.
I truly assumed I was watching a quirky thriller show with elements of extremely dark humor. While it may have been gauche to the point of offensive at moments, I found myself genuinely enthralled in Anna's journey to find out the truth.
As it turns out, the truth was right in front of me the entire time. As I mentioned, I thought/knew this was some sort of adaptation of The Woman in the Window. Following that train of thought, I should have known who the real killer was from the start. But unfortunately, I got duped by Anna's assumptions, just as I'm sure much of the audience did.
The backstory about the neighbors includes how Neil's wife passed away in a drowning accident and Emma, the daughter, "saw the whole thing." Once Bell's Anna starts suspecting him of killing his girlfriend, she's convinced he killed his wife as well. Throughout her little investigation, she also learns that one of Emma's teachers tragically fell from a lighthouse and died while on a field trip chaperoned by Neil, which only furthers her suspicion that he not only killed his wife and girlfriend but the teacher, too.
In an insane scene thought up in Anna's mind, you see Neil fighting with the teacher at the top of the lighthouse before eventually pushing her over the edge. It's...quite graphic.
At this point, I'm 1,000% convinced that Neil is the killer in this show and the ending of the movie this is parodying, The Woman in the Window, is so far from my mind it's not even funny.
What's frustrating looking back is that it was all supposed to be funny in a way, which I definitely should have picked up on sooner given the slew of comedic actors in the cast, including Marc Evan Jackson, who plays the super-odd lighthouse keeper.
As it turns out, though, Neil, the handsome and potentially murderous father, may not be the killer after all. It turns out his girlfriend Lisa was bad news — she and her real (and secret) boyfriend were scamming the widower to get his money. The real boyfriend, Rex, is arrested for the crime...before being almost immediately released.
Turns out Rex is a male stripper, and he was working the night of the murder. When the detective comes to explain this Anna, one of the very best and most laughable lines is delivered concerning Rex's alibi:
After cleaning up the spit-take mess that this line made me make, I watched the police turn their suspicions onto Anna, who, by the way, is a painter.
Turns out they found the murder weapon, and guess what? It was a palette knife used for smearing paint onto canvases, just like the ones Anna keeps for her work.
So why wasn't I understanding that this was a satire? Why couldn't I get it? Because the juxtaposition of drama, darkness, comedy, and ridiculousness was (IMO) immaculately done. I was sort of catching on, but at the same time, I really wasn't.
Creator Hugh Davidson spoke to this element of the show in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter earlier this month, saying, "We didn’t want things to be so straight — you didn’t know that it was supposed to be funny. But it does feel like a more grounded approach would get you to the ending in a more satisfying way, both comedically and as a storyteller, than if it had been joke-ity, joke-ity, joke-ity, all the time." Essentially, the creators wanted that ambiguity — they wanted you to question what this was, thriller or comedy, and to get lost within your wondering.
Davidson addressed some of the general backlash about said ambiguity later in the interview, saying, "I think the people that enjoy knowing what something is far outnumber the ones that enjoy ambiguity. So some of these, they could be like, 'Pick a lane — be funny or be serious.' And the truth is, we did pick a lane — it just might be one that’s uncomfortable because it gradually gets more absurd. I bet that could make some people feel like a joke is being played on them."
He continued to say, "The three of us [the three creators of the show] love things that are inappropriate on some level. It’s inappropriate to have the type of jokes that are in this — the daughter is murdered, and we’re supposed to laugh at that. Whether it’s not funny enough at the beginning, and then it’s too absurd for some at the end, it’s like the whole thing feels a little inappropriate, and that’s something we like." So, like, I was right? I should and shouldn't be laughing at the way the daughter is murdered. I should have been exactly as thrown as I was because that's exactly what the creators wanted.
There is so much absurdity in this show. From the oddball handyman, Buell, who's working on Anna's mailbox for the entire series (which takes place over a couple of weeks, I believe) to the way the female detective delivers her lines, you're left unsure of how to feel throughout the entire thing. As we near the ending, though, everything seems to come into sharp focus in a way that made me go, "Of COURSE, oh my god, how did I lose sight of that?"
After realizing that he's been living in her attic, Anna starts to suspect her handyman of committing Lisa's murder — a worry that's increased when she looks outside and sees him ominously walking toward Neil and Emma's house with a weapon in hand. Trying to stop him from killing yet again, Anna is able to brave the rain (for once without passing out) and enters their home, only to find an extremely shocking scene...
In the entryway, she finds Buell on the floor bleeding from a slit throat. Clearly, he's not the killer, and Neil has been ruled out by police, sooooooo who could it be?
As Anna advances into the house, she comes upon yet ANOTHER startling scene...
Running into the living room where she hears a sound, Anna sees Emma and Neil and runs to protect the child. But upon looking at Neil on the couch, she sees that his throat has also been slit, and he is already dead.
When Anna turns around to look at Emma, the truth of who the real killer is finally gets revealed.
SURPRISE! It's Emma, who is creepily holding the bloody knife she clearly just used to kill her father and assault Buell.
If I had been in my right mind, if I had remembered the ending of The Woman in the Window, I would have seen this coming from miles away. Somehow, though, the absurdity of The Woman in the House completely drew my mind away from the ending of the 2021 thriller movie, where it's revealed that it was the neighbor's child who committed the murder Adams' Anna witnessed.
Just as in The Woman in the Window, the female lead is face to face with a child-aged killer (though in the film, the killer is a teenager, not a literal child, which is where I think even more parody comes into play in the show version). Now Anna has to wrestle this murderous child for her dear life, just as Adams' character had to physically fight the teenager for her life in the film.
This scene...this scene really got me. This scene is where the juxtaposition of horrific and hilarious truly peaked, in my opinion. On the one hand, how? Just how? How did a child get away with apparently killing her own mother, killing her dad's girlfriend, attacking Buell, and then killing her dad (all of which she admits to Anna before the fight breaks out)?
How is this child supposedly strong enough to fight a grown woman who, by the way, literally punches Emma in the face at one point. I'm a 25-year-old woman, and I know for a fact if I were punched in the face I would go down HARD — so is this kid superhuman or what?
And then, even though you know she's murdered multiple people and is trying to murder Anna, watching Anna assault Emma as she fights for her life is super hard to watch. Whoever can witness a child being bludgeoned without cringing is a heartless wench.
But remember: The creators admitted that's exactly what they wanted. They love inappropriate, dark, ambiguous humor — and that's exactly what this show and this scene, in particular, display.
Should you be laughing, or should you be on the edge of your seat? Ideally, for the creators, you would be doing both, especially when watching this dramatic scene. The general theme is "increasing absurdity," and I, for one, think it was done extremely well.
Throughout the show, I kept turning to my BF and asking, "What the heck are we watching right now??" I would laugh, and then I would be horrified, and I hope the creators take satisfaction from those of us that felt that way throughout. Below you'll see footage of my brain throughout this whole series, which took me on a truly wild ride:
GIF Maker (no specified creator) / Via media.giphy.com
While the show may not have been for everyone, I think the creators managed to make their dream come to life in a truly unique way. If you want a straightforward thriller, definitely opt for The Woman in the Window, The Girl on the Train, or something else along those lines, because The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window certainly doesn't fit the stereotypical mold of those titles.
From the star-studded cast (which includes a brief cameo from Glenn Close in the ending of the finale) to the brilliantly confusing plot, The Woman in the House was well worth the watch, if for nothing else than spending four hours being enthralled and confused at the same time.
