#The Murder Case of Rebecca Moore looks like a good read

[questionsandespresso]

Hey y’all

How many anti-harem fanfics in UTAU have you seen with this premise?

“MC moves into S/O’s house where her skeleton boyfriends bully MC because they believe S/O’s lies/rumors but MC didn’t actually do any of that stuff”

I found a lot of these on AO3, and I wonder if I just happen to be bad at finding fics or if this is actually what the majority of these fics are

Cause uh, I mean it’s fun and simple but like-

But when are we getting a premise where the MC actually murdered someone?

Have your MC commit sin. Make them an arsonist, or a psychopath. Maybe they used to be a really bad drug addict and are now recovering, used to participate in morally ambiguous experiments on monsters, actually did some of that freaky shit etc.

Or they’re the victim of someone’s revenge plot. Like the S/O got bullied by them when they were younger, their life completely ruined by them, and now that they have magical skeletons, they’re gonna make the MC pay for what they’ve done.

[rewolfaekilerom]

this week in reading.

//NOTE: This was originally posted on Wordpress on 04.11.2021//

I read a few things this week, and I thought I’d group them all together in this post because they’ve collectively helped me come to a realization about my reading preferences.

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve never really given much thought to the genres of books I like to read. Or, rather, I never really knew how to put into words what I like about the books I like. I can say “oh, I like mystery” or “I really enjoy some fantasy stuff,” but there wasn’t a unifying element or genre. Or so I thought.

I feel a bit like I’m confessing something, but after re-reading the first 8 books of Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (Sookie Stackhouse, True Blood, whatever) and then reading Daphne Du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn for the first time, along with Lucy Foley’s The Guest List and the first few pages of Alix Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches, I’m ready to say that my preferred genre is gothic.

My all-time favorite novelist is Barbara Michaels. I’ve been reading her books since I was probably too young to be reading them–maybe 9 or 10? I remember reading one of her books in the backseat of the car during a family trip to Vermont, which must have been around that time. Her novels are often categorized as “romance novels,” but I think it’s actually Romance (with a capital R, as in the early 18C literary movement, not a Harlequin romance). Other sources will say they’re gothic or supernatural suspenses. I agree with that, and maybe one day I’ll write about why I love those books so much. For now, though, it’s enough to say that I love them.

So, Du Maurier is a new favorite of mine. Rebecca was one of the first books I read for fun after finishing the PhD, and it was the first book that I felt free to read without also dissecting. I loved it so much, so I’ve had her other books on my “to read” list for a while.

The thing I love the most about Rebecca–and, I guess, about all gothic novels, really–is the atmosphere. That’s something Barbara Michaels gets right, too, but the focus right now is Rebecca. This is a book that’s saturated with atmosphere. The way Du Maurier describes spaces and the bodies that move through those spaces is sensuous, rich, and complex. As you read Rebecca, you feel like you can smell the rooms the narrator meanders through–it’s like Maxim’s aftershave and Rebecca’s perfume linger and lift off the page as you read. Your body feels clammy and compressed as you read the narrator’s thoughts as she navigates the literal and figurative maze of life at Manderley.

And then, bonus, you get a really good mystery.

I’m a sucker for a mystery. So, yeah, I like gothic novels, but I especially love gothic mysteries. It took me a PhD and 30 years of life to realize this fact, but that’s fine. No judgment here.

Back to Rebecca: it’s a rich story–rich in every sense of the word. Honestly, I don’t even know if “rich” is saying enough. It’s SATURATED with atmosphere. As I read that book, I feel like I am in Monte Carlo and Manderley. I know the scenery, and the faces populating that scenery, better than I’ve known some apartments I’ve lived in or some people I spent hours with. It’s a visceral reading experience, and I love every second of it. You can reread Rebecca. That means a lot.

Another thing about this book? We are all the narrator. I don’t care who you are or how badass you are. The narrator’s insecurities and struggles and worries and anxieties are something you’ve felt at some point in your life. It’s relatable in a way that is almost disorienting and repugnant. You identify with the narrator, but you also come to hate her and her insecurities and her naiveté. I think that says more about the reader than it does about anything else, but what do I know? In any case, that’s a story where jealousy and insecurity–things that are intrinsically tied to power–are the veils around which hides a deeper narrative about how our identities form and how one’s ability to consolidate one’s own identity is itself an act of power that can be denied.

I’m constantly puzzled if I think Maxim and the narrator’s story is a romance. The Netflix adaptation says it is, and sometimes I think it is. Well, maybe not in the “in love” sense of the word “romance” but in the “loving” sense of the word. I guess it doesn’t matter, but it’s something I think about while reading. “Romance” and “love” can be a lot of different things, and that’s a book where lust looks like love, but kindness and companionship also looks like love.

All this is to say that I love Rebecca and I had high hopes for Jamaica Inn, which in a lot of ways lived up to but also didn’t live up to those expectations. It’s good, don’t get me wrong. I read it in two days and mostly enjoyed it. But what Jamaica Inn doesn’t have–and what most other gothic novels get right, for me–is a terror, an insidiousness, a series of threats to the heroine that are subtle and suggestive. This book doesn’t play with your head like you might expect a gothic novel to do; it lays its cards on the table and then slaps you in the face with danger.

Rebecca is a compelling read because you don’t really know what’s wrong at Manderley for most of the book; you just know something is wrong and you want to figure out what it is, so you keep reading. With Jamaica Inn, you know what’s wrong–you know that Mary’s uncle is a brute and violent and menacing. It doesn’t matter that he’s a smuggler or a murderer or a wrecker (spoiler: he’s all of those things) because he proves early on that he’s a monster. And by the time you get something compelling–for instance, the fact that the uncle isn’t acting alone, or rather that he’s not in charge of the smuggling operation–you’re 70% through the book.

So, yes, to correct myself: there is an unknown threat, and that’s the vicar. He’s the “true” bad guy, but honestly, they’re all bad guys in some way or another. The danger he presents is real because he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing–as his illustration not-so-subtly points out–but again, it slaps you in the face. And by the novel’s early twentieth-century, ableist approach to characterization, his physical difference–the very fact that he is albino–serves to mark his difference. We know there’s something different about him because he looks different. It’s a tale as old as time. It’s not a good tale, and it’s not a tale that we’d want to see written now, but it’s important to acknowledge that the trope of physical difference/disability standing in for some questionable moral quality (or even innate evilness) was and is common in literature across the globe. So any adept reader will know from the moment that the narrator makes the vicar’s albinism apparent that there’s something up with him. Reading the scenes with the vicar made me long for a story that would do something different. I’d hoped his albinism was a red herring–that it was simply a facet of his character that indicated nothing about his moral standing or views of the world. But alas, my hopes were dashed and Du Maurier rubbed my nose in my own optimism. Maybe I’m taking it a bit personally.

Shifting gears slightly but not too much, the romance plot is endearing, but you can see where it’s going from the second Jem steps onto the page–he’s the good brother who’s pure at heart, and we know this because he’s so much younger than Mary’s uncle, was often the victim of his elder brothers’ bullying, spent more time with his mother, and is engaged in less morally questionable illegal activity. He can be forgiven while the uncle cannot; he’s worthy of love while the uncle is not; he will come out alright while the uncle will not. We get a few pages where we question his nobleness, but that skepticism is quickly dashed from our minds as someone else steps in to be another bad guy. I like that, but it also left me feeling grounded throughout the reading experience. I had two feet on the ground and knew exactly where I was going while reading Jamaica Inn. I don’t feel that way while reading Rebecca or many other gothic novels, and I like that.

And again, the pacing is frustrating. I’m not talking about the pages and pages of describing moors or landscape. I studied 19C lit; I’m comfortable with that. I might even say I enjoy it. In fact, there’s a lot about this novel that feels like something like, say, Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life. It’s a good book, but the interesting parts sometimes get buried in storylines that aren’t as compelling. What I’m talking about is the fact that 70% of the novel is the same threat and then the interesting threat–the stuff that might get a reader invested and destabilized–takes up the last 20-30%. The climax of the novel felt hurried, and the denouement was like downhill skiing rather than a winding, twisty ride through a not-so-lazy river. (That metaphor got away from me.) This book needed a heavy-handed editor.

Which ties in with my experience reading Foley’s The Guest List. Apparently this and The Hunting Party are essentially the same story with different locales. Or maybe a better way of putting this is that both of these books show Foley adopting the same premise with more or less successful results. The Guest List got better ratings than The Hunting Party on Goodreads, so I followed my novel-reading-and-reviewing overlords. In any case, though, it suffers from the same issue with organization, if we’re going to put it in first-year-composition terms. But where Jamaica Inn manages to keep you invested in its characters for 100% of the novel even though the stuff that is psychologically compelling (even if it wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped for) takes up maybe 30-40% of the book, The Guest List truly does contain its climax and denouement within the last 5% of the book. If the climax and denouement of Jamaica Inn felt like downhill skiing, those parts of The Guest List felt like riding a rocket straight into Earth–there was no suspense, no delayed gratification. The book spent the majority of its pages vaguely creating and then completing its unlikeable characters’ backstories before then murdering its most unlikeable character and identifying the potential suspects for the murder all in the span of, like, 10 pages.

Murder. Chapter for suspect 1. Chapter for suspect 2. Chapter for suspect 3. Chapter for suspect 4 . . . Back to murder and . . . REVEAL.

The thing about this is that it’s taking something that Agatha Christie did right and making it obnoxious and tedious. Christie and countless others have played with the same type of story structure: revealing that someone has not died but not saying who, presenting a cast of characters who all have something to hide, showing the murder but obscuring the murderer, revealing that all of the characters were connected in some former life and thus have a reason to kill, refusing to reveal the murderer until the last possible second. Together, these can be incredibly successful at building suspense and keeping the reader on their toes. But The Guest List takes those techniques for building suspense–especially jumping in time and between narrators in order to give all sides of a situation while still masterfully leaving the reader in the dark, so to speak (which is also arguably a facet of gothic lit), in order to keep the reader invested–and turns it into something that manages to make you less invested.

I’m not going to rehash the plot, so check it out on Goodreads. My novel-reading-and-reviewing overlords have done it better than I ever could. But the thing I want to emphasize is that despite (1) knowing that a murder has happened and (2) recognizing early on that nearly every character is sketchy and hiding something, I never really cared all that much to find out who was murdered or why. It just . . . didn’t concern me. I was more invested in making sure all of the female characters escape with minimal harm done to them by a gaggle of, frankly, lecherous men.

To put it bluntly, I’m tired of mystery novels that attempt to create suspense by putting their female characters in danger of sexually aggressive men. It’s lazy, and so is using self-harm to prove that a character is going through something.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s an interesting premise and the description of the scenery is gorgeous. Foley gets those things so right. I could dwell in the detailed and atmospheric descriptions of this secluded island for days. In fact, I wish there was more of that–maybe with less of the lecherous-man-lechery and self-harm. Swap those things and we’d be on our way to something that’d make me want to read again.

In case you haven’t noticed, I judge a book by how willing I am to read it again. I LOVE rereading books, so it’s a compliment when I want to do so.

So, where does this bring us in my week of reading? Jamaica Inn was good but not as good as Rebecca. The Guest List is a story about characters who are so utterly unlikeable you end up wanting the boat to abandon them on that island.

And then there’s Harris’s series. I’ve read most of them before–probably as a teenager? I thought I’d read all of them, but Wikipedia tells me there’s 13 books rather than 8. It looks like I stopped reading when I started college, which makes sense in some way. Say what you will about this series (I enjoy it), but from a technical standpoint–that is, from the standpoint of pacing and organization and world-building–this series does a lot of things right. I’ll write on it in the future, maybe, but I’ll just say that I think this is a surprising example of a series that takes gothic and supernatural tropes and wields them to their fullest potential. I like that.

So, I guess that means I have like 5 books to read now. That’s a pretty awesome surprise, if you ask me.

xoxo, you know.

[fyrapartnersearch]

strangers cornered in a dark room

i. a b o u t : 

— hi. i'm cosima. ﾍ (￣ー￣) ﾉ✨

— i'm hopeless and awkward and desperate for love.

— i'm in my mid 20s and live in the forest foraging leaves, berries, and diet mountain dew. i'm like bigfoot but sadder and not as wife material.

— my gender is best described as 'spooky' but feminine or neutral pronouns are both fine.

— i roleplay over email or gdocs and ooc on discord (but i might rp on a server if you ask nice and bring me flowers).

— i don't roleplay with cis men. y'all had your shot and ya blew it.

— idk what else you wanna know just ask me if i missed something.

ii. r u l e s : 

— i pretty much exclusively double which means those of you who aren't into playing multiple mains may wish to dip now. i don't really like going beyond two main characters each (so no 'tripling' or 'quadrupling') but i do like having big casts of recurring/side characters.

— speaking of doubling, i will write any kind of pairing for my partner: mm, ff, mf, nb, you name it. i even take fc requests. this does mean i would like the same from my partner and as i am partial to playing my female characters against male characters, i need my partners to be ok with that (so if you only do mm or ff it prob won't work out!). i'm also not crazy into platonic ships for main characters. highkey love me some romance.

**if you, for whatever reason, really hate to double, then i'm gonna play f in mf and if that's ok with you it's ok with me.

— i don't keep a posting schedule but i generally try to reply within 48ish hours. you don't have to do the same but generally i'd like at least two replies a week. consistent ooc chatter is 👌.

— limits: i don't do that raunchy shit. i don't do fetish-based roleplay. violence, language, gore, and smut are all well and good in proportion. regardless of the content of an rp tho i will not engage with partners under 20.

— word counts are an illusion. i don't really like super short rapid fire roleplay but i also don't like pointlessly lengthy responses. i guess i fall into some kind of '''''''''casual literate''''''''' category if you wanna use that. write whatever you feel is a good amount for the scene we are in and i will do the same. i don't match and don't expect you to either.

— as for ditching (everyone's favorite topic!!)... lbr we've all done it at least once or twenty times even if it was by accident. i'd love a heads up if you've lost interest or are just too busy or overwhelmed to commit atm but i know that things come up and it just doesn't happen sometimes. in those cases, feel totally free to hit me up weeks/months/whatever later. in general i will try to let you know if i'm not feeling it or if i know i'm gonna be busy or whatever.

iii. r o l e p l a y :

— i only do original roleplays atm so, uh, sorry? i'm not organized enough to have actual plots but i'm just organized enough to have some loose ideas, some themes, and some dreams. these are all super open to interpretation and i have nothing concrete in mind so i welcome suggestions. just, pls, don't come at me out of left field with suggestions for things unrelated to what i've listed.

— a house that breathes

— setting: 1800-1910s / countryside, europe, possibly elsewhere 

— genre: mystery / romance / horror / thriller / gothic

bleak landscapes / ideal courtships turned into bitter marriages / deadly secrets / ghosts / living houses / creepy servants / distant husbands / bold heroines / decayed decadence / cash poor aristocracy / moors / cold climates / passion / codependency / jane eyre / wuthering heights / rebecca / jamaica inn / penny dreadful

— nightcall

— setting: 1970s-futuristic / big city, north america, anywhere

— genre: mystery / supernatural / detective / horror

red neon-lit hotel rooms / midnight drives / dive bars and smoke-filled lounges / inhuman eyes / disappearances / brutal murders / cryptids / towns that exist out of time and place / wtnv vibes / detectives / turning into something else / supernatural detectives

— beautiful crime

— setting: 1920s-modern / big city, small town, north america, anywhere 

— genre: mystery / crime / noir / detective

heists / dames & femme fatales / nation-shaking crimes / black dahlia-esque mysteries / deceit / detectives / private investigators / serial killers / cat and mouse games / suspect existence failure / corruption / crimes of the century / maltese falcon-esque

— khairei, deerslayers!

— setting: 1920s-1990s / university town, north america, europe 

— genre: campus novel / mystery / slice of life / thriller

"travesty, horror, decadence, excrement" / classics / spoiled rich pretentious youths / bacchanals / young professors / impromptu shakespearean performances / secrets / taking things too far / substance abuse / ivy-covered façades / sleepy autumnal towns the secret history / if we were villains / university traditions / exclusive clubs / legacies

— miscellaneous

rural life / found families / tumultuous relationships / established relationships / victorian spiritualism & obsession with death / the 1920s / ww1 / ww2 / old hollywood / the old west / american civil war / american revolution / versailles / revolutionary france / something like the alienist? / something set in a spooky pacific northwest town (basically twin peaks but without the other dimensions) / pretty much anything historical / southern gothic / ww2 or cold war-era espionage / vampires that aren't lame

ix. c o n t a c t :

— discord: ask

— email: latinised@gmail.com

i would appreciate if you could provide some details about yourself and what you're interested in when you get in touch. if your message is nothing more than "still looking for rp?" i'mma slam dunk it in the trash, sorry.

thank you sm for reading this far. hopefully that means you wanna rp. and if not uhhhhh i guess thanks for reading anyway!! xoxo

i. a b o u t :  — hi. i'm cosima. ﾍ (￣ー￣) ﾉ✨ — i'm hopeless and awkward and desperate for love. — i'm in my mid 20s and live in the forest foraging leaves, berries, and diet mountain dew. i'm like bigfoot but sadder and not as wife material. — my gender is best described as 'spooky' but feminine or neutral pronouns are both fine. — i roleplay over email or gdocs and ooc on discord (but i might rp on a server if you ask nice and bring me flowers). — i don't roleplay with cis men. y'all had your shot and ya blew it. — idk what else you wanna know just ask me if i missed something. ii. r u l e s :  — i pretty much exclusively double which means those of you who aren't into playing multiple mains may wish to dip now. i don't really like going beyond two main characters each (so no 'tripling' or 'quadrupling') but i do like having big casts of recurring/side characters. — speaking of doubling, i will write any kind of pairing for my partner: mm, ff, mf, nb, you name it. i even take fc requests. this does mean i would like the same from my partner and as i am partial to playing my female characters against male characters, i need my partners to be ok with that (so if you only do mm or ff it prob won't work out!). i'm also not crazy into platonic ships for main characters. highkey love me some romance. **if you, for whatever reason, really hate to double, then i'm gonna play f in mf and if that's ok with you it's ok with me. — i don't keep a posting schedule but i generally try to reply within 48ish hours. you don't have to do the same but generally i'd like at least two replies a week. consistent ooc chatter is 👌. — limits: i don't do that raunchy shit. i don't do fetish-based roleplay. violence, language, gore, and smut are all well and good in proportion. regardless of the content of an rp tho i will not engage with partners under 20. — word counts are an illusion. i don't really like super short rapid fire roleplay but i also don't like pointlessly lengthy responses. i guess i fall into some kind of '''''''''casual literate''''''''' category if you wanna use that. write whatever you feel is a good amount for the scene we are in and i will do the same. i don't match and don't expect you to either. — as for ditching (everyone's favorite topic!!)... lbr we've all done it at least once or twenty times even if it was by accident. i'd love a heads up if you've lost interest or are just too busy or overwhelmed to commit atm but i know that things come up and it just doesn't happen sometimes. in those cases, feel totally free to hit me up weeks/months/whatever later. in general i will try to let you know if i'm not feeling it or if i know i'm gonna be busy or whatever. iii. r o l e p l a y : — i only do original roleplays atm so, uh, sorry? i'm not organized enough to have actual plots. i'm just organized enough to have some loose ideas, some themes, and some dreams. these are all super open to interpretation and i have nothing concrete in mind so i welcome suggestions. just, pls, don't come at me out of left field with suggestions for things unrelated to what i've listed. — a house that breathes — setting: 1800-1910s / countryside, europe, possibly elsewhere  — genre: mystery / romance / horror / thriller / gothic bleak landscapes / ideal courtships turned into bitter marriages / deadly secrets / ghosts / living houses / creepy servants / distant husbands / bold heroines / decayed decadence / cash poor aristocracy / moors / cold climates / passion / codependency / jane eyre / wuthering heights / rebecca / jamaica inn / penny dreadful — nightcall — setting: 1970s-futuristic / big city, north america, anywhere — genre: mystery / supernatural / detective / horror red neon-lit hotel rooms / midnight drives / dive bars and smoke-filled lounges / inhuman eyes / disappearances / brutal murders / cryptids / towns that exist out of time and place / wtnv vibes / detectives / turning into something else / supernatural detectives — beautiful crime — setting: 1920s-1960s / big city, north america, anywhere  — genre: mystery / crime / noir / detective heists / dames & femme fatales / nation-shaking crimes / black dahlia-esque mysteries / deceit / detectives / private investigators / serial killers / cat and mouse games / suspect existence failure / corruption / crimes of the century / maltese falcon-esque — khairei, deerslayers! — setting: 1920s-1990s / university town, north america, europe  — genre: campus novel / mystery / slice of life / thriller "travesty, horror, decadence, excrement" / classics / spoiled rich pretentious youths / bacchanals / young professors / impromptu shakespearean performances / secrets / taking things too far / substance abuse / ivy-covered façades / sleepy autumnal towns the secret history / if we were villains / university traditions / exclusive clubs / legacies — miscellaneous rural life / found families / tumultuous relationships / established relationships / victorian spiritualism & obsession with death / the 1920s / ww1 / ww2 / old hollywood / the old west / american civil war / american revolution / versailles / revolutionary france / something like the alienist? / something set in a spooky pacific northwest town (basically twin peaks but without the other dimensions) / pretty much anything historical / southern gothic / ww2 or cold war-era espionage / vampires that aren't lame ix. c o n t a c t : — discord: ask — email: latinised@gmail.com i would appreciate if you could provide some details about yourself and what you're interested in when you get in touch. if your message is nothing more than "still looking for rp?" i'mma slam dunk it in the trash, sorry. thank you sm for reading this far. hopefully that means you wanna rp. and if not uhhhhh i guess thanks for reading anyway!! xoxo

[aion-rsa]

Why The Woman in the Window Fails to Channel Alfred Hitchcock

https://ift.tt/3byAIVa

This article contains The Woman in the Window spoilers.

Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window is not shy about its Hitchcockian influence. It’s there in both subtle and overt ways from the very first scene. During one of the film’s opening shots, the camera pans around Amy Adams’ ridiculously spacious New York City brownstone and passes a television screen that is inexplicably playing the ending to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) in slow-motion, with Jimmy Stewart wrestling against the grip of an out-of-frame Raymond Burr.

With a very similar premise to Rear Window—a slightly deranged New Yorker pries into the hidden lives of her neighbors—The Woman in the Window freely owns up to its influences and aspirations. Sadly, Rear Window, this is not. Which may explain why 20th Century Studios (back when it was called 20th Century Fox) delayed the movie for reshoots, and then Disney ended up selling this otherwise incredibly polished and stylish thriller to the industry’s algorithm farm upstate: Netflix.

Admittedly, The Woman in the Window is not intended to be a direct remake of Rear Window or any other Hitchcock picture. The talent involved is too smart for that. Rather the film is taking a plethora of inspirations from various Hitch joints, and marrying that Master of Suspense ethos with a modern sensibility created by author A. J. Finn, who wrote the novel the film is based on. I have not read the book, but the bestseller clearly benefited from the boom of “grip lit” novels—thrillers often centered around the unreliable perspective of flawed female protagonists—in the 2010s.

So it is that The Woman in the Window’s Dr. Anna Fox (Adams) is an exceedingly troubled individual, suffering from a trauma we only learn late in the story was caused by the tragic death of her husband and child. Those deaths were in turn precipitated by Anna’s own infidelities, which left her distracted while driving on an icy road. Hence the audience is asked to question everything we see in The Woman in the Window, including whether Anna really met the woman she thinks is Jane Russell (Julianne Moore) and if Jane was then actually murdered across the street.

In essence, it’s the same setup of Rear Window where Anna thinks her neighbor (Gary Oldman in the newer movie’s case) murdered his wife, but the accusation is clouded in doubt for even the audience since Anna is such an unreliable narrator that for two-thirds of her movie, she convinces us that she’s going through a divorce instead of grief.

And yet, none of these added elements distract from the fact that this movie wants to be Hitchcock, or at least the heir to what many consider to be his masterpiece. It’s there every time Anna spies on her neighbors through the long lens of her old school camera, which unsubtly harkens back to Stewart’s Jeff doing the same in Rear Window. And it’s woven into the silver mane of hair on Oldman’s head, which intentionally echoes Burr’s sinister everyman who lives in the apartment across from Jeff’s.

Even the film’s opening shot more covertly recalls another Hitchcock classic starring James Stewart: Vertigo (1958). With its slowly spiraling image of snow drops drifting in a circle through the air—an image we later learn is the last thing Anna saw before her family died—we’re retroactively reminded of the spirals that consumed the mind of Stewart’s Scottie in that film. The zoom-in, pullback dolly shot Hitch also made famous in that movie of nerve-inducing stairwells is likewise visually referenced in The Woman in the Window, with the stairwell in Anna’s home recreating the same high anxiety composition as a set of stairs in one of Hitchcock’s earliest films, the silent British production, Blackmail (1929). I’m also fairly convinced that the shot of Adams opening her eye in the second image of The Woman in the Window is a visual recreation of Janet Leigh’s frozen death stare in Psycho (1960).

Right down to its plot about wives causing a case of mistaken identities, the Hitchcockian overtones are heavy in The Woman in the Window. So why doesn’t it work?

For all of Hitchcock’s innovative understanding of the filmmaking craft, and panache for droll showmanship as the “Master of Suspense,” his own passions and fixations (particularly at their most perverse) colored his work with an eerie madness. Or at least the best ones. Sure, he is one of the first directors to make himself a household name via attention-grabbing cameos and almost car dealership-like theatrics in the rollout of new movies’ marketing. And when Tippi Hedren asked him why her character in The Birds (1963) would open a door if there are menacing noises on the other side, he replied, “Because I said so.”

But then, despite its popularity, The Birds is hardly one of Hitchcock’s best films. And the hypnotic effect he created with the better ones often spoke to something truer, and frankly uglier, than the glossy veneer of his star-studded casts. Ironically, this is probably truest about the two Hitch films Woman in the Window most desperately emulates: Rear Window and Vertigo.

Read more

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In both films, one could sense the devious pleasure Hitchcock took in casting Jimmy Stewart—the all-American face of Frank Capra classics like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)—as his on screen avatar.

In the case of Rear Window, Stewart still plays an ostensibly heroic individual. Jeff is a man’s man and a photojournalist who goes into warzones, vacations on safaris, and breaks his leg while covering a high performance car race from a dangerous vantage point. But there is something more unsettling beneath all that machismo which is what won the attention of a much younger high society girl, Lisa (Grace Kelly).

There’s a gnawing suspicion about the awfulness of his fellow man, and a peculiar desire to revel in it. When Jeff can’t do that from behind enemy lines, he’ll settle for studying it in his own backyard—it’s a view he shares with a slew of neighbors overlooking a lower Manhattan courtyard. He doesn’t start spying on them though because he heard a scream and fears for a woman he just met. He does it out of boredom while his leg is bandaged up. Well that, plus a perverse curiosity, be it in the form of lust for the dancer across the way, Miss Torso, or a voyeuristic fascination with the despair of a woman he nicknames Miss Lonelyhearts. That he discovers a man murdered his wife is entirely happenstance.

Only after he seduces Lisa into sharing his obsessions—to the point where she’ll break into the neighbor’s home—does he realize she’s the perfect girl for him. And after she’s been fully indoctrinated, she shares his “ghoulish” disappointment (her word) when they’re falsely made to believe for a moment that Lars Thorwald’s wife is alive and out of town. That of course turns out to be a misdirection. Lars (Burr) is having an affair and has his mistress pose as his dead wife for a train ride.

Mistaken identity becomes even more pivotal in Vertigo, Hitch’s most revealing cinematic manifesto for how he sees himself. In that film, Stewart appears again but as someone who is hardly depicted as an alpha male. The only hero in this story dies at the beginning when Stewart’s Scottie is so crippled by terror that he cannot save himself as he dangles from a rooftop. The police partner who comes back for him to lift him up ends up taking the literal fall.

Afterward, Scottie (like Anna Fox) is seen as damaged goods by himself and everyone who knows him. Particularly in the 1950s, being diagnosed as suffering from acrophobia or any form of mental illness was treated as an inherent form of weakness and a deficiency of character. An onscreen judge spells this out after Scottie again appears to let his vertigo ruin him, causing him to fail to save the woman he thinks is Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). He can’t find the wherewithal to follow her up a bellow tower, and is then treated to the horror of seeing a woman fall to her death outside.

Of course the twist of the movie is that Novak is not playing Madeleine; she’s Judy Barton, the woman whom Madeleine’s husband Gavin (Tom Helmore) has hired to impersonate his wife and seduce Scottie before running up a high stairwell. At the top, Gavin waited to throw his actual wife to her doom. Unfortunately for Judy, Scottie’s broken mind wouldn’t stop looking for her until one day he found the woman he thought he loved still walking the streets of San Francisco.

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The Woman in the Window blends these narrative elements. Once again, a protagonist with a phobia (agoraphobia here) mistakes a blonde woman—Julianne Moore’s Katie—for another character’s wife. When Jennifer Jason Leigh barges into Anna’s brownstone, it’s meant to be as bewildering as when Scottie sees Novak still walking around, now as a brunette, in Vertigo. Of course Woman in the Window plays with the convention by making it the biological mother of Oldman and Leigh’s adopted son whom is murdered, as opposed to the actual wife. Indeed, Moore’s Katie just enjoys playing into Anna’s misconception that she’s the wife of Oldman’s Alistair Russell.

But these reliances on miscommunication and unreliable narrators aren’t really in service of anything other than the twist. The thrill, such as it is, amounts to little more than Anna’s epiphany of staring into a photograph and realizing thanks to a reflection that a blonde woman played by Moore really was inside her home. The rug is then even further pulled when it’s revealed that (SURPRISE!) it wasn’t Alistair who murdered Katie, but Katie’s actual biological son, Ethan (Fred Hechinger).

However, the twist is as empty as Anna’s painfully quiet home. It’s intended to be a “gotcha” reveal, but it never really gets under the skin.

By contrast, the idea that Madeleine is really Judy in Vertigo is a gateway to explore Hitchcock’s vices: blondes and the desire to control them. It’s why Stewart’s Scottie becomes as manipulative as an auteur with a fetish, and as possessive of his new paramour as the filmmaker who’s still trying to replace his greatest leading lady collaborator after she’s retired from acting to be the Princess of Monaco. Scottie maniacally remaking Judy into Madeleine, and Jimmy Stewart remaking Kim Novak into Grace Kelly, is some bizarre but intoxicating allegory about Hitchcock and his own self-image of his obsession.

Notably, Vertigo wasn’t a hit in 1958. In fact, it flopped at the box office and was only reevaluated as a masterpiece in the 1980s, after Hitch’s death. It was too weird and, intentionally or not, introspective for the ‘50s. And personally, I still prefer Rear Window for better balancing the director’s eccentricities with his commercial instincts to make a top notch thriller which can be revealing about the darker side of human nature yet still remain addictively entertaining and playful.

Woman in the Window attempts to wear the style of both, but has no controlling idea to add to those affectations other than a subversion of their twists: it’s the son who murders the other woman instead of the husband who kills the wife. The meaninglessness of this mangled reversal is why it feels so cheap when the movie devolves into a slasher flick, with Ethan chasing Anna to the rooftop as if he were attempting to star in “Scream 5” instead of “Rear Window 2.”The Woman in the Window is a loving impersonation of Hitch, but be it a thriller or a comedy, an impersonation is never going to carry a movie.

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