Amy Adams Can’t Trust Anyone, Herself Included, in First The Woman in the Window Trailer

Amy Adams’ latest bravura performance doomed to be short-changed by the Academy would appear to come to us in The Woman in the Window, Darkest Hour director Joe Wright’s forthcoming, Tracy Letts-scripted adaptation of A.J. Finn’s 2018 bestseller of the same name. The first trailer for the Twentieth Century Fox feature showcases a Hitchcockian thriller in which Adams plays the eponymous observer, trapped in the eye of a hurricane of deception, danger and psychological upheaval.

Adams’ protagonist is Anna Fox, an agoraphobic child psychologist who lives in New York City, a prisoner of her condition. At the behest of her therapist (Letts), she allows her neighbor, Jane Russell (Julianne Moore), into her home, a glimmer of hope shining in from the outside world. But Anna’s life is upended when she witnesses Jane’s violent murder through her front (as opposed to Rear) window—instead of seeing justice done, the lead detective (Brian Tyree Henry, now required by law to appear in every movie, for which they are all the better), Mr. Russell (Gary Oldman, who won an Oscar for his performance as Winston Churchill in Wright’s Darkest Hour), the ostensible Mrs. Russell (Jennifer Jason Leigh, in Annihilation mode) and even Anna’s own doctor team up to gaslight her into mistrusting her own perceptions, suggesting her anxiety medication (or her tendency to put alcohol on top of it) is making her hallucinate, and that she’s never met the actual Mrs. Russell. Meanwhile, Wyatt Russell’s unidentified character is lurking all over the place, and we never even see Anthony Mackie’s. The titular woman in the window is at the center of a tangled web, indeed, and she can hardly trust even her own mind as she fights her way out of it.

The “Why now?” of The Woman in the Window is obvious—the very concept of gaslighting has seldom loomed larger in the zeitgeist, and as privacy gradually goes extinct, voyeurism is ever more the order of the day. Adams’ turn will obviously be key to the film’s success, but the six-time Oscar nominee’s resume speaks for itself.

The Woman in the Window opens in the States on May 15, 2020. See the film’s trailer and poster below.