Woman in the House review: Kristen Bell’s Netflix true crime spoof dizzys

Watch the trailer of Kristen Bell for 30 seconds The Women in the House across the Street from the Girls in the Window (TWITHATSFTGITWYou can say it five times as fast from now on!However, the Netflix series seems like any other crime story aimed at bored housewives such as the one Bell portrays. That’s kind of the point.

TWITHATSFTGITW fancies itself in conversation with the glut of book-to-screen women’s crime thrillers: Gone Girl, The Train Girl and last years’ abominable The woman in the windowYou can also watch it on Netflix. There’s an unreliable narrator, a missing white woman, a suspicious boyfriend, trauma, addiction and lots of wine. What is the depth of this parody across eight episodes that were screened to critics for review?

What is the story behind The Girl in the Window and the Woman in the Home Across the Street?

Hugh Davidson and Rachel Ramras, a husband-and-wife team, created the series, as well as Larry Dorf who also helmed it. Nobodies. TWITHATSFTGITW Executive produced by Will Ferrell and Jessica Elbaum.

Costarring alongside Bell are Michael Ealy as Anna’s ex-husband, Mary Holland as the best friend, Tom Riley as the suspicious but hunky neighbor, and Cameron Britton, in all his serial killer-esque glory, as the always-lurking handyman.

What’s it about?

Bell’s Anna is a divorced alcoholic painter grieving the death of her daughter several years prior. Without any income she can see, Anna sits outside her luxurious suburban house, a wine glass full to the top and an unfinished crime novel. She looks out over the bustling neighborhood.

Until one evening she witnesses the murder of the girl in the window across the street — or does she?

What’s it reeeaaaally about?

TWITHATSFTGITW It is a comedy about the many crime book-cum-screen adaptations of the past decade. Anna shares a first and middle name. The woman in the window’s protagonist, played by Amy Adams, but also a similar backstory and trauma responses. She is like her The Train Girl’s Rachel (Emily Blunt), Anna drinks too much and is painted (pardon the pun) as an hallucinatory loose cannon. But it’s all played for laughs: her voiceover speaks in a British accent temporarily, the fruit bowl in her kitchen holds a mountain of wine corks, and the death of her daughter comes about in the most ridiculous way possible.

To pack yet another reference to a recent book-to-screen mystery featuring an unreliable narrator, the apparent murder victim is a flight attendant — a la Kaley Cuoco’s The Flight Attendant — because of course she is. Like those that came before her, Anna is going to solve the murder that everyone around her is telling her didn’t happen.

Does it work? Good?

The movies this show is parodying were, at least, watchable, thanks to a level of care given to the story and locale with the backing of Hollywood’s big bucks. TWITHATSFTGITWThis film was clearly shot on Hollywood’s backlot and doesn’t have the same atmosphere as other series or films. Accompanied by nonsensical voiceovers, mixed metaphors, clunky dialogue even when it’s not satirizing its predecessors, and problems with pacing (nothing really happens for the first half of the eight-episode season), TWITHATSFTGITW falls into the traps that it’s trying to critique.

Because of Anna’s grief, an absurdly heightened reaction to rain after the death of her daughter on a rainy day (you’d think she’d move from her high precipitation locale, but I digress), and her addiction, Anna is told that what she sees is more likely an hallucination than bearing witness to a legitimate crime. It’s the same stuff of the works that inspired it, but here feels like an insensitive portrayal of mental illness in an attempt to align itself with its forebears. Anna keeps doing things like venturing out during a storm even though it’s a trigger for her and inexplicably reaching into a hot oven without gloves, actions which make her less sympathetic and more like a caricature (particularly when juxtaposed with Amy Adams’ more convincing portrayal of agoraphobia in The woman in the window).

Netflix Photo

And while I don’t think a protagonist has to be likable — certainly none of TWITHATSFTGITW’s contemporaries are — they should at least resemble an actual human person. Anna is so flighty, haphazard and naive that it’s really hard for viewers to care about her plight.

It’s only after three middling episodes that the story kicks into gear and so does our ostensible heroine, at least to the degree that the character is capable. Anna, who is a self-described armchair detective, seems pretty clueless. It doesn’t occur to her that the woman across the street is far likelier to have been murdered by her intimate partner (conveniently Anna’s love interest) than the randos she fingers, the inverse of Anna’s suspicious, unreliable contemporaries who immediately point fingers at the husbands. Anna might have solved this mystery quicker and saved the audience if she’d made more progress with the mystery novel while perched on the window.

Watch or not watch?

I struggle to imagine many viewers making it past the first episode or two, but if they do they’ll be rewarded by perhaps TWITHATSFTGITW’s only saving grace: the cameo in the closing moments of the show’s final episode. I won’t spoil it here, but it’s a cameo to rival The Flight Attendant season 2’s casting announcement of Sharon Stone, both in content and in iconic ’90s thriller actress status. It’s a twist so juicy, it made me rethink if I’d actually tune out for a (potential) season 2 after all.

TWITHATSFTGITW – Where can you watch??

All 8 episodes The Women in the House across the Street from the Girls in the Window Netflix is now available starting January 28th.