Even Depp can't blow fresh air into ‘Window’

REVIEW

By David Germain

updated 4:30 p.m. ET March 16, 2004

Johnny Depp and John Turturro can elevate almost any movie, and they do lift the psychological thriller “Secret Window” a bit above the morass of horror cliches that riddle this latest Stephen King adaptation.

Yet Depp’s manic tics and Turturro’s menace carry only so far. The secrets of “Secret Window” are obvious almost from the start, and much of the movie comes off as a retread of earlier King tales about writers wrestling evil doppelgangers or wacko readers.

The movie begins with promising moodiness as director and screenwriter David Koepp quickly establishes the scenario: Successful author Mort Rainey (Depp) catches his wife (Maria Bello) in bed with her lover (Timothy Hutton). Six months later, Mort’s a basket case with writer’s block, alone with his dog at a cabin in the woods, unable even to put pen to paper and sign the couple’s divorce settlement.

A booming knock on his door awakens Mort from one of his daylong snoozes on the couch. At the door is John Shooter (Turturro), a bullying Mississippi redneck who accuses Mort of plagiarizing his short story and demanding that things be put right between them.

Mort angrily dismisses Shooter, who leaves behind his tattered manuscript. Unsettled by the similarities between Shooter’s tale and a story he published years earlier, Mort tumbles into a nightmare of escalating terror as his tormentor moves from threats to ugly deeds.

Predictable plot twists

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Koepp, who directed “Stir of Echoes” and wrote “Panic Room,” has a flair for capturing fidgety characters in claustrophobic spaces. With “Secret Window,” Koepp again wrings solid dramatic punch out of comparatively limited character interplay.

Depp’s left alone prowling and ranting much of the time, and he admirably turns his comic jitteriness from last year’s blockbuster “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” toward alarmingly spastic hysteria here.

Turturro, though doing little more than a straight version of the Southern drawl he copped in “O Brother, Where Are Thou?”, brings creepy intensity to Shooter’s confrontations with Mort.

Bello nicely captures the conflicted antipathy and affection a spouse feels for her ex. But Hutton and co-stars Charles S. Dutton as a gumshoe Mort hires to ward off Shooter and Len Cariou as the hapless local sheriff are largely filling up space in shallow roles.

The real problem is that “Secret Window” borrows so heavily from conventions in any number of old fright flicks. The movie is laden with recycled elements from King’s own “Misery,” “The Shining” and “The Dark Half,” and unless you’re a virgin viewer of horror tales, you’ll likely see the plot twists coming a long way off.

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