Real-estate porn can work for a thriller — or against it.
Sometimes, it’s part of a movie’s mystery and allure: the luxe nooks and crannies where bad vibes can hide.
(See “Rosemary’s Baby” or “What Lies Beneath.”) But in “The Woman in the Window,” the stately Harlem brownstone in which Anna Fox (Amy Adams) lives is a movie set of such gloomy palatial grandeur that the place threatens to overwhelm everything that happens inside it.Anna is a nervous wreck of an agoraphobe who hasn’t left the house in 10 months.
It’s her cocoon, her prison, her stately dream chamber.
The high-ceilinged rooms are bathed in a shadowy glow, the muted colors left over from an aging renovation, with a winding wooden staircase that extends so far up it never seems to end.
It’s a dwelling fit for the Magnificent Ambersons, or maybe a good haunting.But there are no ghosts here.
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