Review of the mini-series "The Woman in the House Opposite the Girl in the Window" - a detective parody that does not know what to laugh at
An ironic thriller with Kristen Bell from the authors of Robot Chicken.
Anna (Kristen Bell) is struggling with the death of her daughter and the resulting separation from her husband. Spending days at home with a glass of wine in one hand and antidepressants in the other, the woman smoothly plunges into hallucinogenic delirium: there, in the fantasy world, her family has not yet collapsed, and life is full of meaning and prospects. But as soon as the visions disappear, you again have to put up with a bleak reality. Her friends have long considered her crazy, Anna's paintings are idle in a dusty workshop, and hours of silence are interrupted only by unanswered calls from a psychotherapist. One day, new tenants appear in the house across the road - a single father (and part-time irresistible handsome Tom Riley) Neil and his daughter Elizabeth (Eppie Prat), also faced with the loss of a relative. Attempts to improve relations with neighbors are crossed out by a sleepless night: the heroine sees a woman being killed in the opposite window, and now she is trying to prove to everyone in the district that she really witnessed the crime.
From a project with a shamelessly ironic title and a script from the author of Robot Chicken, you immediately expect some kind of postmodern mockery of the endless film adaptations of books about mentally unhealthy women who witnessed (as it seems to them) a real murder. The Hitchcockian classics did not die and, moreover, fell in love with the writers of dime novels: the Rear Window model - also, by the way, a literary adaptation - showed how thin the line between madness and reality was, and a few decades later it became a convenient genre constructor, where from rearrangement sum of terms remains the same. Swap a woman for a man, a photographer for an artist, and a leg injury for agoraphobia, and you get a less elegant, but always intriguing movie.
"The Woman in the House Opposite the Girl in the Window" at first fights on the bright side, uncompromisingly ridiculing the slightest clichés of the genre. The very first scene is accompanied by an openly mocking monologue: the heroine Kristen Bell tells incoherent facts about herself (“My husband told me I don’t wear a jacket and then complain about the weather”) with a deliberate British accent, and at the end admits that she is not from England at all. In other episodes, eccentrics like a crazy lighthouse keeper or worried mothers will appear on the way of Anna - also a kind of artless cartoons on the mysterious and controversial characters of detective novels. Even the heroine's illness is hypertrophied: she, they say, suffers from ombrophobia and at the sight of rain every time she loses consciousness in a dramatic way.
The problem, however, is that for a full-fledged parody, The Woman in the House is paradoxically serious. A few intricate ironic finds here account for dozens of scenes made not in spite of, but, on the contrary, according to all the patterns of the genre. And let the next suspense moment end with a strange twist (Anna's main suspect, for example, leaves home in the evenings ... to work as a ventriloquist), it's hard to call this a real deconstruction. Punchlines do not stick together with setups - they are rather scattered at random in order to surprise (and, in theory, laugh) the viewer as much as possible. Even the choice of the killer here turns out to be a kind of act of disobedience: in order to shock the audience, the authors turn the most inappropriate character for this role (even more inappropriate than in Scary Movie) into an antagonist.
Kristen Bell is charming as always, but she plays Emily Blunt or Amy Adams from the movies that the show is supposed to be parodying. And the camera and music - completely ordinary by the standards of the genre - pump up, instead of ironically. The creators have frighteningly little sense of humor: they only make a couple of corrections with markers in a cheap detective story, but do not risk rewriting all the pages clean. If this is laughter, then only over one's own impotence and the erroneous opinion that for a good parody it is enough to laugh it off a couple of times in the dialogues.
This article was sponsored by Bianca Lazu
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