Kristen Bell as Anna in thriller parody The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window.
Kristen Bell as Anna in thriller parody The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window.
Opinion by Karl Puschmann
Karl Puschmann is Culture and entertainment writer for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
Let's get any potential mystery out of the way first: as a side-splitting genre parody The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window is not great.
But, in a plot twist you may not have seen coming, as an actual entry into the suburbanthriller genre? Well, it's not too bad.
The series' tone is as puzzling as the genuine hook of the mystery at its core. Setting its mildly humorous title aside, TWITHATSFTGITW takes its satire extremely seriously. There's suspense, tension and even the odd jump scare. If you didn't know better, or weren't paying attention, you could almost mistake it for the real deal.
It was only when some ridiculous event would occur or when series star Kristen Bell would earnestly intone something like, "There's so many layers to casseroles... just like there are so many layers to a person," that I'd be reminded not to take this cliche-filled, yet maddeningly addictive, series so seriously.
The Netflix series plays on, and checks off, all the cliches you'd expect to see in movies like The Woman in the Window or The Girl on the Train so stop me if you've heard this one before.
Just the one glass of wine for Kristen Bell's traumatised character Anna.
TWITHATSFTGITW follows Anna, a woman dealing with the awful death of her young daughter and subsequent marriage break-up by gulping down hilariously oversized glasses of red wine, popping prescription pills, making chicken casseroles, mooching about her lovely house and intoning philosophical voiceovers.
"When your past is so present," she wonders, guzzling down another glass of vino, "how can there be a future?"
She's snapped out of her living haze when her eye catches a new neighbour moving in across the street. She begins spying on him and then develops a full-blown crush after he knocks on her door one afternoon. Her awkward flirting leads to a shared casserole dinner and daydreams of living happily ever after. Right up until she spies his flight attendant girlfriend arriving home.
After some choice words between the two, she retreats to her wine and her window where she stays, silently watching until she witnesses the girlfriend being brutally murdered.
Or, does she? The police find no evidence of a dead body and early on we see Anna struggling to contain her grief by imagining her daughter is still alive or slipping into fantasies with her neighbour.
Is the murderer in the loft? Is the murderer real?
Questions over her mental health swirl as she determines to crack the case herself, an action that leads her down an increasingly sinister path.
Aside from the whodunnit aspect the big mystery of the show, like those it parodies, is whether Anna is actually losing her tenuous grip on reality or if she really did see a heinous crime.
Not since Leslie Nielsen in Airplane! or The Naked Gun has comedy been played so deadpan. But where Nielsen was an oblivious straight man to the chaos around him, TWITHATSFTGITW plays everything straight. Its tone is dark, its soundtrack eerie, its cinematography consistent with the genre.
The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window is streaming on Netflix.
Bell too keeps things straightlaced, allowing just enough winking awareness through to allow her to pull off the increasingly absurd situations, like dramatically collapsing in the middle of the road because of her rain phobia, and those frequent, funny, voiceovers.
"To get to the bottom of something, sometimes you have to remind yourself that if you don't risk anything, you risk everything," she says, in a determined hush. "And the biggest risk you can take is to risk nothing. And if you risk nothing, what you're really doing is risking not getting to the bottom of something. And if you don't get to the bottom of something, you risk everything."
All is not what it seems in the thriller parody The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window.
Perhaps the funniest thing about the show is that the comedy isn't what's bringing me back. I'm bizarrely invested in this cliche-ridden series in much the same way I was by its source material, last year's incredibly average psychological thriller The Woman in the Window. It's so by the numbers but I want to know more and I want to see what happens. Especially as events get increasingly farcical with each passing ep.
If you watch closely you'll spy a few laughs in each episode, but TWITHATSFTGITW is so beholden to genre's tropes that as it went on I began to wonder if it was having a laugh.
