It was only last year that Netflix released the deadly-serious psychological thriller The Woman in the Window, so it takes some chutzpah, or a dose of self-awareness that you don’t normally associate with massive American corporations, to release a spoof less than 12 months later. Well, after The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window no one will be able to go back and watch The Woman in the Window without creasing up.
This is genre-cide in action – there can be no more po-faced thrillers featuring grief-stricken suburban women guzzling flagons of red wine, manically dropping casseroles and just happening to witness gruesome murders in otherwise perfect neighbourhoods. Indeed, there can also be no more literary or televisual fiction titled The Girl or The Woman, no matter which window seat, train or prescription meds the woman is on. And if it does kill off this particular grab bag of tired tropes – here’s hoping – then it is the perfect send-off.
The plot concerns Anna (Kristen Bell), a grieving mother for whom every day is the same. She sits by a window peeping at the dishy new neighbour and delivering monologues about the past being “just another cul-de-sac where you park your car full of memories and you can’t find reverse”. Then she happens to see a brutal murder. Or was it, as the investigating officer suggests, those two bottles of wine?
You could, of course, parody this kind of thing in a two-minute sketch – French and Saunders spent much of the Nineties honing the spoof take-down to a lethal edge and Saturday Night Live continues the tradition from time to time. The danger therefore for an eight-part series is that the joke wears thin.
What’s clever about The Woman in the House is that it isn’t just jokes. There are plenty of set-ups and pay-offs but there’s also a perfectly workable whodunit underpinning the four hours, complete with jump scares, some brilliant sound design and a series of excellent performances from actors of the calibre of Tom Riley and Mary Holland.
