The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window just premiered on Netflix
and it’s got everyone talking.
The satirical dark comedy thriller stars Kristen Bell as Anna who is still grieving over the
death of her young daughter, Elizabeth.
On a rainy day, Anna’s husband Douglas, a forensic psychiatrist for the FBI specializing
in serial killers, takes Elizabeth to work with him while he interviews serial killer
Massacre Mike, and after a mistake leaves Douglas locked out of the interview room,
Mike kills and eats Elizabeth.
Following this event, Anna and Douglas have separated, and Anna spends her days secluded
in her house drinking many bottles of wine and prescription medication, which her therapist
warns her not to mix.
This leads to many hallucinations, and although Anna frequently hears noises coming from her
attic, she writes them off as all being in her head.
She used to be a painter, but hasn’t been able to since the tragic death of her daughter,
so instead fills her time with reading mystery thrillers like The Woman Across the Lake and
spying on her neighbors.
Anna also now suffers from a debilitating fear of rain.
Across the street new neighbors Neil and his young daughter Emma move in, immediately catching
the interest of Anna.
After cooking a casserole and having dinner with her new neighbors, Anna and Neil bond
over losing a loved one, as his wife Meredith had recently drowned.
The two hit it off perfectly, and Anna begins to think she’s finally found someone she
can move on with.
But then Neil’s girlfriend Lisa shows up and Anna is sent into a tailspin.
Anna begins spying on Lisa and stalking her on Instagram, discovering that Lisa has two
phones and seemingly a second boyfriend named Rex.
But before Anna can confront Lisa, she sees through the window that Lisa is brutally stabbed
to death.
The police, led by Detective Lane, investigate and Neil claims that Lisa had left for work
as a flight attendant and was currently traveling to Seattle.
With everyone believing that the murder was all in Anna’s head, she is forced to do
her own investigation.
Anna discovers that Neil was originally a suspect in his wife’s death, but was eventually
cleared of all charges.
She also discovers that Emma’s teacher was killed by falling off of a lighthouse on a
school trip that Neil was a chaperone on.
When Anna sees Neil loading a body bag into his car, she confronts her neighbor, accusing
him of being the killer.
Neil reveals that inside the body bag was in fact a ventriloquist dummy, which he used
to secretly perform at open mic nights, but was too embarrassed to ever tell anyone.
If the killer wasn’t Neil, there was a whole cast of other characters that could be potential
suspects.
There was Sloane, Anna’s loyal best friend who runs an art gallery.
Carol, the town gossip who constantly makes references to her important husband that is
never seen.
And then there was Buell, the kind but awkward handyman who spends literally the entire series
fixing Anna’s mailbox.
After her confrontation with Neil, Anna returns home to find the mysterious Rex waiting for
her.
Rex reveals that Lisa’s real name was Chastity and was a bartender at the club he stripped
at.
He was her accomplice in her schemes to date older rich widows and scam them out of large
sums of money.
After starting her scam on Neil, Rex broke things off with Lisa because he didn’t want
to scam someone with a young daughter.
So now Lisa had cut him off from their money and he was there to look for it.
Rex’s theory is that Lisa faked her own death and wanted Anna to see so that she could
run off with the money.
Anna takes a liking to Rex and the two wind up having sex.
The next morning, the body of Lisa is discovered and Detective Lane arrives at Anna’s house
to arrest Rex.
Feeling the situation is resolved, Anna tries her best to move on with her life.
She stops drinking, goes off her meds, starts painting again, and even begins to rekindle
her budding relationship with Neil.
But that all comes crashing down when the murder weapon is discovered to be a palette
knife Anna used in her art.
Detective Lane arrests Anna, now the prime suspect.
Anna’s bail is paid by Sloane, so she returns home, but begins to question her own sanity
and fears that she may have actually killed Lisa without realizing or remembering.
Anna then discovers that Buell has secretly been living in her attic and it’s revealed
that not only has her therapist been her ex-husband Douglas, but that Buell was a former patient
of Douglas who had been rehabilitated and given a job as a handyman after brutally murdering
his entire family.
When Anna sees Buell heading across the street to Neil and Emma’s house, she is forced
to face her fears and chase him through the rain to stop his next murdering spree.
Upon entering Neil’s house, Anna discovers Buell has been stabbed and was near death,
and was actually only there to deliver mail that had mistakenly been delivered to Anna.
Anna then discovers that Neil has been murdered and that the true identity of the killer was
in fact Neil’s young daughter, Emma.
Emma had killed her mother Meredith after discovering she was pregnant, but Emma wanted
to remain an only child.
She killed Lisa after Lisa wouldn’t allow her to eat chocolate.
She killed her teacher after her teacher called her crazy.
She killed her father, Neil, out of embarrassment for his ventriloquist act.
And now she was going to kill Anna and continue to blame her for the entire series of deaths.
Anna and Emma then have a brutal fight, which ends with Anna killing Emma with a broken
shard from her casserole dish.
After Anna is absolved of the murders and recovers from her injuries, she and Douglas
rekindle their romance.
Proving she was finally over her past traumas, the two kiss outside in the rain.
A while later, Anna and Douglas now had a new baby, and Anna hops on a plane to visit
her friend Sloane who had moved to New York City to run an art gallery.
Sitting next to Anna on the plane was a mysterious older woman played by Glenn Close.
After waking from a nap, Anna heads to the plane’s bathroom and discovers the dead
body of the mysterious passenger.
She alerts a flight attendant who checks the bathroom and finds no body, then claims that
there was never a passenger booked in the seat next to Anna.
Anna returns to her seat, fearing that she was once again hallucinating, but after finding
the mystery passenger’s golden compact, Anna realizes the passenger was very much
real and she was now in the middle of a brand new mystery.