The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window (series)

I ignored this series for a long time because I thought based on the titles that it was going to be some sort of Scary Movie piss-take of "The Woman in the House" or "The Woman in the Window" which was a recent film or series that I did not watch but was a "Top 10" on Netflix recently.

Since I am running out of stuff available on Netflix that I actually want to watch I decided to finally give this a go and since all of the 8 episodes are less than 30 minutes long, it was actually a very quick watch that I completed in just one night.

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From this point forward I am going to refer to The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window simply as "the series" because I'm not typing that every time. The series is presented as a "dark comedy" but honestly, I can find very few uses of actual humor in the entire series. It is more of a thriller than it is comedy.

Kristen Bell, who I love by the way, plays the lead role of Anna Whitaker, who is a painter turned alcoholic do-nothing after the surprise death of her daughter a few years earlier. While she has experienced some level of recovery, she has become a recluse that is now terrified of rainfall. The being afraid of rainfall is something I found stupid but I looked it up and it is a real, albeit rare, disorder called Ombrophobia.

Anna becomes incapable of movement whenever caught in a storm and to be honest they kind of overuse this fear in the series. Any time that she needs to be able to do something quickly, it conveniently starts to rain and in multiple situations she finds herself passed out in the middle of the street outside her house and has to be carried and cared for by others.

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The aspects of her life such as her disorders, the way in which she basically just ignores all of her friends, and how she willingly wastes every day away by popping pills and drinking absurdly huge glasses of wine is interesting enough. The total lack of any sort of hangover is the least realistic part of this series.

In these drug-addled states she experiences a mix of emotions including hearing sounds coming from the attic, which at some point in the past contained her painting studio that she never visits and inexplicably she is afraid to go up there. Tension is created by this fear and there are plenty of "bumps in the night" or of course, when it is raining outside and Anna is aware of the fact that her drug and alcohol use can at times bring on hallucinations.

We, the audience are left to our own devices to determine whether or not what Anna is seeing or hearing is real or imagined and this makes the series interesting. When a single father moves in across the street one day, we don't have to put on our imagination caps too much to see where this is going to go.

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As good-intentioned as Anna is with her neighbors, and as much as she appears to simply want to be left alone, she really comes across as a very nightmarish neighbor who is always poking around in other people's business. She basically just sits at her window with a completely full glass of wine and is super nosey about what all of her neighbors are up to. Even though she is good looking and makes a mean chicken casserole (something she does many many times in the 8 part series) I think I would have a problem with one of my neighbors constantly peeking in on my property. This is something that is never addressed in the series.

While I do not want to spoil what happens in the series, the show stays interesting enough because we, as the audience, are constantly kept guessing about what is real, and what is imagined. One thing that I am quite certain that people will notice is that when visiting her daughter's grave the epitaph changes during each visit. This leads us to believe that she is imagining the entire thing and kind of makes us wonder if her daughter is even real.

A lot happens in season one and I do not know if a season 2 is in the works. I know that I hope not since the series was basically wrapped up - in a not-so-great way and the conclusion of this one.

Should I watch it?

To be honest with you, I don't think I would have ever watched this if it weren't for the fact that Netflix seems to have a dwindling amount of series that are actually worth watching at all. There are "slim pickins" in there these days so I might not have ever even turned this on if for no other reason than for the very stupid title. This isn't necessarily their fault since the original title was just going to be "The Woman in the House" but that was already the title of a film from the 40's.

I can say that I watched all of these, back-to-back, in one evening and this isn't something that I am capable of enduring if it isn't at least somewhat good. Is the story convoluted? Yes; does the end result make any sense? Not really; is it entertaining? I thought so.

Therefore I think I can recommend this to other people because even with its misgivings, Kristen does a really good job in her role and the story has enough twists and turns to keep people interested even though some of the twists are very convenient and dare I say, kind of lame.