An agoraphobic woman witnesses a crime that, to take action, she will have to face her deepest fear.
Interesting premise and great acting, yet it fails to deliver on many fronts. Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Wyatt Russell are great. That’s the elephant in the room. Tracy Letts’ script and Joe Wright’s directing create a significant issue, though: they increase, by the minute, the distance between the audience and Anna – admittedly, not intentionally. The close-ups and the Dutch angles, the tracking shots, and the low and high angles are plenty. It would be exciting to ask the editor, Valerio Bonelli, about his experience editing it. It feels like its pace is all over the place, and its rhythm is like a song you want to like, but you are too confused to dance to it. Bonelli seems like the person who puts together scattered pieces of visuals that the filmmakers had no idea what to do with. That causes the twists not to be able to find their place in the plot, and consequently, they lose their gravitas. The fact that A.J. Finn’s book has been receiving rave reviews and the film nothing but scathing makes Wright’s film a mediocre adaptation for the big screen. I haven’t read the book, though; therefore, I cannot really comment on that, just putting it out.
This character-driven story shouldn’t have been Brian DePalma meets Alfred Hitchcock, but Body Double (1984) meets Rear Window (1954). It’s a real shame to have so many talented people involved in front and behind the cameras and get that head-scratching result. There are too many techniques and influences that, ultimately, cancel each other out and leave the audience indifferent, at best. In the end, I didn’t know if the plot’s drama or the final cuts made me want to cry. I’ll go with the latter.
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