His birth mother, Katie, was addicted to crack, and her boyfriends beat him while he was growing up. In the book, Ethan is the adopted son of Alistair and Jane Russell. Ethan says he learns about Anna’s traumatic past from a Realtor, and he is able to hack her devices without extra help.

The movie cuts all mentions of the internet community. Advice from one of their Agora conversations also allows him to figure out her phone password and change it so that she can’t call the police on the night he tries to kill her. He uses details he learns about her life to trick her into believing she’s hallucinating. Anna shares that she had an affair and was in a car crash that killed her husband and daughter, not knowing that her elderly confidant is actually Ethan in digital disguise. While Anna normally doesn’t divulge much personal information on the site, she’s charmed by the personality of a Montana grandma named Lizzie.

Under the username thedoctorisin, she builds a reputation for giving advice to others (even though she herself can’t make a breakthrough). In the book, Anna frequents the Agora, an online forum for people who also struggle to leave the house. Here are seven of the most significant differences that impact the way the book and movie endings play out: The discrepancies between the woman in the browser window and the one on the page become clearest in the final act, when Anna discovers that the Russells’ teenage son Ethan (Fred Hechinger) was the killer. Changes to clues and character backstories make the film’s payoff feel like more of a rug-pull reveal than a slowly unraveling mystery, for better or for worse. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list and garnered praise for its suspenseful twists and turns, but readers later got a real-life shock in 2019, when the New Yorker published an exposé on Mallory’s deceitful behavior in the publishing industry.įans should plan to be surprised yet again if they expected the movie adaptation to stick to its source material. But when she meets Alistair Russell (Gary Oldman), he tells her she’s never met his wife, Jane (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Finn), the film follows Adams as Anna Fox, an agoraphobic child psychologist who believes she’s witnessed the murder of her next-door neighbor and new friend (Julianne Moore). Adapted from the psychological thriller by Dan Mallory (under the pseudonym A.

After two years of waiting and wondering when Amy Adams will know peace, The Woman in the Window finally dropped on Netflix on Friday.

The woman in the window novel