Woman In The House's Ending Was A Dream - Theory Explained (2024)

Looking at the many hallucinatory moments in Netflix's The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window ending explained that the finale may be one of them. It was possible that everything was just a dream. Kristen Bell's Anna Whitaker is a depressed divorcee who tragically lost her daughter three years prior, when her husband Douglas, a forensic psychiatrist specializing in serial killers, had a moment of negligence on "Take Your Daughter To Work Day." Anna spends her day drinking bottles of wine with her class four psychotropics while sitting in front of the window facing her new neighbors.

This is the recently widowed Neil Coleman and his nine-year-old daughter Emma. One day, Anna sees Neil's girlfriend Lisa (Shelley Hennig) with blood gushing out of her neck, desperately getting Anna's attention before collapsing to her death. Anna then pursues Lisa's killer, despite everyone's insistence that it was a hallucination. Woman in the House spoofs many psychological thrillers, as the show's absurdly long name suggests. According to one fan theory though (via Reddit), Anna may have imagined most of the finale. While The Woman in The House Across the Street ending explains the killer is Emma, it might actually be Anna.

What Happens In The Woman In The House's Ending

The Woman in The House Across the Street ending explained that the killer is nine-year-old Emma. By the time of the twist, most viewers (and Anna) thought Neil killed Lisa. The secondary suspect was the handyman Buell. However, it turned out it was little Emma, who reminded Anna of her own daughter who had died three years ago. Not only did Emma kill Lisa, but she also murdered her pregnant mother, her teacher, and her father. She also could have killed Anna and Buell too if they had not finally stopped her reign of terror when Anna killed the child in self-defense.

The Woman in The House Across the Street ending explained that Anna killed her mother because she didn't want a sibling, Lisa because she wouldn't buy chocolate bars for her school fundraiser, and her father because she got tired of listening to him practice his ventriloquism. It all seemed quite silly, but this movie was a comedy. There was also a moment at the very end where it jumped a year in the future and Anna meets a woman on a plane (played by Glenn Close), who ends up dead. However, when Anna tries to get help, the body is gone and no one knows who the passenger is. This leads to the theories of Anna's hallucinations.

Stream The Woman in the House Across the Street From The Girl in the Window on Netflix

Woman In The House's Ending Could've Been A Dream

The Woman in the House Across the Street ending is too good to be true, even when considering that this is clearly part of the show's satire. Detective Lane (Christina Anthony) unquestioningly accepts her and Douglas' self-defense testimony for killing a child, and she gives Anna her long-waited justification. Anna's judgmental neighbor Carol (Brenda Koo) even apologizes to her in the hospital. Anna learns that Claire (Nicole Pulliam), the woman in Douglas' suggestively romantic Instagram post, is actually his coworker.

Anna's ombrophobia in Woman in the House is completely cured, so much so that she stands in the rain without even flinching. Finally, Douglas and Anna reunite and have another baby girl. It's not necessarily the events themselves that make the ending implausibly happy, but all the events combined. Every good thing that can happen for Anna happens in the best way possible — all at once. A couple of things could prompt Anna's final delusions. The show explains that Anna's hallucinations come from combining alcohol with her heavy medication.

However, Woman in the House's penultimate episode 7 explicitly notes that Anna is out of wine, and she never takes any medication between her arrest and the finale's events. Anna's ombrophobia causes her to pass out in panic, except in the finale when she fights through it. Potentially, she doesn't actually overcome her fear and is dreaming from that point forward. However, if she is lucid, Emma strikes her unconscious with Woman in the House's recurring chicken casserole dish during their fight. Anna's unreliable narration and hallucinations included Elizabeth playing in her room before she remembered that she died.

Why Anna Might've Been Woman In The House's Real Killer

Many reasons make Anna dislike Lisa, a.k.a. Chastity Linkous, with the biggest being that she prevents Anna from being part of the Coleman family and recreating a life before Elizabeth's death. Despite stabbing a painting she made of Lisa out of anger, Anna's original memory flashes prompting her to recall this is dark, not light, and she's looking down instead of in front of her, where a painting would be placed. While there are plausible explanations for Emma being the killer, as The Woman in The House Across the Street ending explained, certain elements put the killer's identity up for debate.

As satirical as the show is, Emma's reasons for killing her victims are loftier than Anna's reasons for, at least, killing Lisa. What's more interesting is Emma's decision to take such great lengths in framing Anna. Even though Anna broke into her home and called the police on the Coleman residence, with both instances troubling Emma, Anna never expressed any suspicion toward Emma being the killer. Emma kills her victims due to them slighting her in some way.

This included her mother being pregnant with a sibling, Lisa rejecting her chocolate bars rudely, and Neil having a bad ventriloquist act. Anna, however, expresses direct favoritism to Emma by buying lots of chocolate, offering her home as a safe space, and explicitly saying she likes her. Considering how forgetful Woman in the House makes Anna, she could still be the killer instead of Emma.

The Importance Of Woman In The House's Airplane Scene

Anna boards a plane to New York to visit her friend Sloane (Mary Holland), whereupon she meets a mysterious passenger in seat A-2 played by Glenn Close. She sees this passenger after taking Xanax with vodka, thus reinforcing the plausibility that she's hallucinating. Glenn Close's cameo continues to serve the show's satire because of Close's involvement with the psychological thrillers Fatal Attraction and Jagged Edge, but her role could be more significant. Anna's hallucinations seem to present elements and people from reality, so Close could be someone of significance instead of a person from her imagination.

If Anna dreamed most of The Woman in the House Across the Street ending, Close could represent someone trying to get across to her. She's possibly a homicide detective tracking Anna on "business," as Close's character ominously says. Whether Close's character has any actual significance to the show or not, Anna ends the episode by picking up a golden compact mirror sitting on the empty A-2 seat.

She opens the mirror and says a line repeated throughout the season: "Bingo." Unless the mirror exposes more than Anna's own reflection, this act could symbolically mean that the killer Anna was looking for all along was herself. It's difficult to determine how much of the finale, much less the airplane scene, is a delusion, but the episode makes it clear that Anna is imagining at least a portion of it.

Anna's Delusions Make The Entire Show A Parody

Part of what makes this show a clear parody of psychological thrillers is Anna's delusions. It would also be in line with the show for the finale to be exaggerated as one massive hallucination. Anna's delusions come everywhere, like Elizabeth's changing epitaphs. A psychological thriller trope is the main character that no one fully believes, and Woman in the House maximizes this to a comedic effect. The show recognizes that the humor isn't in the serious subjects of grief, drug abuse, and mental health, so it instead satirizes how such subjects are treated in the genre through over-exaggeration and absurdity.

For example, a morose and potentially triggering child grave becomes morbidly funny with text like "There's no 'I' in Heaven." It's not the child's grave that's funny, but the show's environment. In addition to her delusions leading her to potentially kill Lisa, and maybe even Neil and Emma, Anna's mental health addresses deeper themes regarding grief and tragedy. Elizabeth died horrifically in Woman in the House, and Anna must deal with that totally alone. The Woman in the House is obviously a parody, yet it still manages to convey bigger mysteries and more serious issues.

Woman In The House's Ambiguity Justifies It Being A Limited Series

The Woman in the House Across the Street ending is the final curtain for the show, as it's listed as a "limited series" on Netflix. This means there won't be a second season. Kristen Bell's performance is certainly hilarious, and the series acts as a great parody while managing to tackle a number of important themes. On top of that, the show was well-received by audiences. However, it isn't enough to keep the show afloat as a full-blown series. After all, the first season of Woman in the House wrapped up the plot as best it could, and doing anything further with the characters risks cheapening the show.

Anna's delusions form a key part of the Netflix limited series. They're the train that drives the narrative forward while also serving the central joke of the show. The psychological thriller parody series would be a lesser project without her delusions, and the unreliability of the narration is what brings the TV show to a satisfying close. The central dark comedic premise is wholly contingent on that aspect, bringing it to a satirical resolution, and adding a second season to Woman in the House risks discounting the work that the writers put into the series ending.

A second installment to the series could over-explain the ending, taking the wind out of the story's sails. On top of that, explaining that it was all a dream also risks short-changing the series, sucking the mystery out of what should be a parody that retains the intrigue of a top-notch psychological thriller. The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window ends with purposeful uncertainty, paying homage to the psychological thrillers that inspired the parody. Instead of hankering after a second season, it might instead be more rewarding to rewatch the first season and embrace the subtleties of the show's humor.