Woman In The House: What's With Anna Always Making Casserole? (2024)

Warning! SPOILERS ahead forThe Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window.

As a thriller parody, there are many funny elements of The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, one of which is that Anna makes a casserole for any occasion. Five casseroles are cooked over the series’ three and a half hours, all in identical casserole dishes, creating a sort of Groundhog’s Day repetition. Yet, while Anna’s casserole making is undoubtedly part of the parody, the casseroles also serve as a clue to deeper things going on in The Woman in the House…

In The Woman in the House… Kristen Bell plays Anna, a grieving mother whose daughter, Elizabeth, was murdered three years prior. Anna’s marriage to Elizabeth’s father ended after Elizabeth’s death and now Anna lives by herself in the family’s home, drinking copious amounts of wine and popping pills while spying on her handsome neighbor, Neil, and his daughter across the street. After witnessing the murder of Neil’s girlfriend one night, Anna decides to try and solve the crime herself, all the while becoming a suspect herself due to her mental instability and addictions.

Over the course of The Woman in the House… there seems to be no situation that casseroles can’t help. Anna brings a casserole to dinner at Neil and Emma’s house, uses a casserole to lure murder details out of Neil’s late wife's sister, distracts the police with casserole, and even brings a casserole to Elizabeth’s grave (with her mysteriously changing headstone epitaphs) on what would have been her birthday. As Elizabeth’s favorite dish, the casserole is obviously a coping mechanism for Anna following Elizabeth’s horrific and sudden death, however, the dish also has deeper meaning in The Woman in the House… acting as a tool for the parody while also cluing viewers into Anna’s mental instability.

Woman In The House: What's With Anna Always Making Casserole? (1)

Anna’s casseroles provide telling details from the very first scene in The Woman in the House… when Anna forgets to wear her oven mitts as she pulls the casserole from the oven and severely burns her hands. This pattern repeats throughout the series, however, Anna’s burns get progressively less severe, signaling to the viewer the alleviation of Anna’s grief. Anna makes the dishes because they remind her of her daughter and each time, the process becomes a little less painful as Anna works through her grief and guilt over Elizabeth’s death.

This pattern also works to identify Anna as an unreliable narrator as each time Anna pulls the casseroles from the oven and burns herself, she mutters about how she always forgets things. In this way, Anna’s casserole making plays into the thriller genre’s classic bait-and-switch trope, with Anna’s character leading the viewer to suspect her as a killer that does not remember her crime. The blatancy of Anna misdirect, however, perfectly enacts the parody of The Woman in the House…, serving up themetaphorin the form of casseroles.