Review: The Woman in the Fifth

If it wasn’t so damn annoying it’d be vaguely impressive that a film with a scant running time of barely 90 minutes could feel so long, laborious and drawn out. Adapted from, and therefore sounding exactly like, the cheap thrillers advertised in train stations The Woman in the fifth is a somewhat pointless film leaving its audience feeling decidedly smeh about the whole affair.



TWITF tells the story of an aggravatingly underdeveloped estranged father who decamps to Paris in order to reconnect with his frosty ex wife and six year old daughter. We start off knowing hardly anything about Ethan Hawke’s Tom and it stays that way right to the very end leaving us with annoying niggling questions. For instance when his wife calls the police worried about Tom’s “violent reaction” we have no idea if it’s just posturing or a valid fear. Ethan Hawke is solid as Tom delivering a text book estranged father who’s also a writer and might be a bit mental performance but due to underdeveloped story and stilted dialogue we don’t really know whether we should be rooting for Tom or worrying about his next move. This ambiguity could be a big draw to those who enjoy paint your own style of storytelling but I just found it maddeningly frustrating. There are some pretty nifty nature shots of bugs and decay that may be there to suggest some kind of inner degradation but seeing as the visual metaphor is never fully explained we’re essentially left with some arty shots of flies and spiders.

TWITF continually drops a series of red herrings: What is Tom’s mystery job? Who is this Margit character? Is Tom a few sandwiches short of a picnic? Why is that buzzer so loud? But the answer to these questions is 90% horrifically dull, unexplained or just plain ignored. Kristen Scott Thomas is compelling as object of Tom’s infatuation Margit but despite second billing she has a pitiful amount of screen time and when she does appear she does very little to justify us continuing to care about who exactly she is. One scene, that in the trailer looked to be full of unspoken lust and romance, was reduced to a laughable bout of off screen fumbling entirely devoid of lust, romance or any purpose.

TWITF is not a terrible film, despite all I have said. It does however commit a sin which to my mind is far worse than 6 Indiana Jones 4’s strung together. It is smeh, middling, dull and leaves you thinking more about what you’re going to have for tea than what you just saw. It could be so much more but it decidedly very much isn’t, when Tom steps out onto the Parisian streets and screams, much to the shock of a passerby, chances are you’ll want to do the same.