Secret Window’s tag line – “Some windows should never be opened” – is so snarkily appropriate in its unintentional damning of this ridiculously overwrought psychothriller that it’s a wonder some smart underling at Columbia hasn’t leapfrogged up the studio ladder by pointing it out to the powers that be. Their error is the critics’ gain, though, and even the presence of Johnny Depp, as novelist Mort Rainey, can’t save this film from its own unintended melodramatics. The recently separated Rainey spends the majority of his time in his lakeside cabin, a cluttered wood frame hideaway where he splits his time between licking his wounds, sleeping on a ratty davenport, and, occasionally, working on a new mystery novel. David Koepp, who adapted the screenplay from Stephen King’s novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, has done some fine work as both writer and director in the past (his 1996 paranoid thriller The Trigger Effect is an overlooked minor classic and his scripts for Carlito’s Way and Panic Room are top-drawer to boot), but here he seems to have relied too much on King’s original story (voiceovers are rampant and frequently hilarious), and what was once borderline creepy is now merely borderline interesting. After a night out with longtime pal Jack Daniels, Rainey is confronted by a black-clad Mississippi drawler in the form of John Turturro, whose mysterious John Shooter accuses the author of plagiarism and then initiates a campaign of terror on the bleary-eyed Rainey in an effort to either get him to admit the error of his ways or drive him insane or, even better, both. Turturro (so good recently as the madder brother of Tony Shalhoub’s manic compulsive investigator Adrian Monk) can do off-kilter like nobody’s business, but here, with his cornpone accent and aw-shucks hickification, he comes off as Robert Mitchum’s dumber brother from Night of the Hunter, and by the time the movie’s conclusion is apparent (which is about 15 minutes into the film), you just want to slap that silly black hillbilly hat of his head. Depp, thankfully, gives it his all. His Rainey is a quirky mess with all the telltale tics of real-world writers: He talks to himself (and his dog) endlessly, he procrastinates like a pro, and he just might be a little bit crazy himself. Impending divorce can do that to a man (or woman), especially when he discovers his wife in bed with Timothy Hutton. Hutton, oddly enough, also starred in 1993’s The Dark Half, another of King’s many stories of broken scribes and busted souls, and the two films share an inkwell full of thematics. Secret Window, however, lacks the previous film’s B-movie sucker punch, and by the final reel it degenerates into a hackneyed mishmash of obvious revelations and cheap, ineffective horror theatrics despite Depp’s mangy fun. There’s no car crash in this one as in his current television project Kingdom Hospital and much of his recent writing – King penned it before that wayward van almost took him out of the running forever – but the film itself is an effective enough metaphor for out-of-control bullshit that frankly, Koepp aside, was part and parcel of King’s novella from page one.
This article appears in March 12 • 2004.