The dream stylization of The Woman in the Window is in part achieved by its use of fated or fateful coincidences. In our dreams and nightmares, a single face may appear and reappear in different guises…. Lang effects his Gothicism … subtly, utilizing a straw hat. The boater was a common enough sight in the Forties, but, save for the three important characters who wear them, The Woman in the Window offers a sea of fedoras. (p. 14)

The motif of the straw hat telescopes the dreamer's anxiety, his justifiable paranoia. From [Professor Wanley's] point of view, the straw hat suggests that he is being pursued by the serial selves of a single, protean nemesis. The "coincidence" of the hat, no coincidence at all, helps to define the coordinates of the labyrinth from which [Wanley] seems unable to escape. Darkened rooms, corridors, car interiors, and the menacing walls of a once-benign street all contribute to his sense of entrapment….

At least one critic has complained that the setting of The Woman in the Window is unrealistic, too barren, the victim of its low budget…. The rain-washed studio streets of The Woman in the Window, a noir convention, are expressive enough, and one shouldn't complain that they are empty; our dreams are also low-budget productions, peopled in a very selective fashion. If the buildings in these nocturnal scenes are too clearly sets, can it not be argued that this contributes positively to the stylized, dreamlike ambience? Dr. Caligari, another mental set, is even less "realistic" than The Woman in the Window, whose stark façades, the result of design or expediency, also bring to mind the unadorned and disquieting architectural caprices in the paintings of de Chirico….

The Woman in the Window, as its title suggests, is a compendium of glassy surfaces, of ad hoc mirrors and unreliable reflectors—so many traps in the labyrinth. The dream itself, featuring the professor's alter ego, is a kind of fun-house mirror, if only because it recasts the club's doorman and hatcheck clerk as the blackmailer and Mazard (as we discover when the dream is over). [The woman], however, has no "real life" equivalent, and her illusory nature is literally communicated through mirrors or windows which belie their everyday optical functions….

The death of Mazard seems authentic enough, but again mirrors serve as metaphor. As in Scarlet Street and The Big Heat, the killing is reflected in a mirror, a modest infinite regress; and the multiple images of the two accomplices establish the circumscribing nature of the crime, its infinite range of consequences. [The woman and Wanley] are each contained by a mirror of their own, doubling the spatial tension in the room and accentuating the psychic distance which separates these two strangers. (p. 15)

"Only a dream," grumble critics and viewers, as though dreams were meaningless constructs…. According to [the D.A.], "It's too late for us," and Wanley's dream attests to that truth, which he must live with if not accept. Unlike Wanley, most of us censor our worst nightmares or refuse to consider their implications. The pathos of The Woman in the Window is predicated on the definitive self-knowledge supplied by Wanley's nightmare. Viewed as the logical culmination of a myriad of effects, as the exit from the labyrinth, the dream-ending should seem considerably less blatant.

If Orson Welles is the baroque master of film noir, then Fritz Lang is its classicist, an economical and precise craftsman whose carefully controlled effects are all the more powerful for the compression of their means. The Woman in the Window, with its running time of ninety-nine minutes, could be profitably studied by those contemporary directors of thrillers who usually need two hours to tell their stories. (p. 16)