Jeff's home is a two-room apartment. The film takes place either from the vantage point or inside his living room, which has a kitchenette separated by cupboards. The apartment contains a large bay window that overlooks the inner courtyard, a fireplace, a door to the single bedroom, and a front door three steps up from the hallway floor.

For the most part, the entire film is seen from Jeff's perspective, and all action takes place within one huge set. We, the audience, watch Jeff as he in turn, camera-in hand, watches the various apartment dwellers go about their lives. The spatial restrictions provide for a very cinematic film because it consists of three basic things: Jeff looking out at his neighbors, what he actually sees, and his reaction to what he sees. (Apparently no one uses curtains in this particular apartment building, and so the apartment dwellers become exhibitionists to be savored by Jeff's voyeuristic impulses.)

The language of objects plays a central role in Rear Window. The objects and their locations give many important clues about Jeff and Lisa (and the other protagonists) to the audience. The photographer's camera, of central importance literally and figuratively to the movie, compliments the running theme of voyeurism in the movie.

The objects in Jeff's apartment give hints as to why he is in a wheelchair with his leg in a full cast. In the apartment are smashed 8-x 10-camera equipment, a wonderful photograph of a racecar accident, other photos of fiery blazes and accidents, and a war scene. Also, there is a framed negative of a blonde woman's face, and the same photograph of the woman on the cover of a large stack of LIFE Magazines, labeled "Paris Fashions."

The murderer's apartment contains the knife, saw, and the aluminum jewelry sample case that all hint at the possibility that Thorwald (Raymond Burr) has killed his wife and dismembered her body. The apartment also contains the rope-bound trunk with the wife's belongings. All of the evidence points to murder, and the audience joins Jeff and Lisa in their quest to unravel this murder mystery. At one point, Jeff and his assistants, as well as the audience, are actually temporarily led to believe that the rope-bound trunk contains bits of the body. “He better get that trunk out of there before it starts to leak,” says Stella.

Jeff certainly doesn't want his future marriage with Lisa to end up like that of Thorwald's. It is significant that our lasting images of Thorwald are of him being berated by his nagging wife. In the end, the horrible murderer loses some of his vileness when he is revealed as the pitiful product of a cruel fate he only tried to escape from. The movie ends significantly with Jeff facing away from the window and in the same company as Lisa. She is reading a magazine of the type Jeff would much prefer her to read. But this idyllic image of the happy couple is undercut in a typically Hitchcockian way. When she knows he is asleep, Lisa pulls out her own preferred reading material—Harper's Bazaar.