Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Secret Window features everyone’s favourite eccentric, Johnny Depp, in the role of Mort Rainey, a successful writer with an unsuccessful personal life. He’s currently undergoing a messy divorce with his wife who he still loves. His life consists of sleeping fitfully, eating infrequently, and generally getting on everyone’s nerves, especially his soon to be ex-wife’s boyfriends. Tempering this slightly is the fact that he has become a virtual recluse, living in a lake house retreat, failing to find inspiration to write new stories. (Boy do I know that feeling – without the lake house retreat, though.) His life gets even worse when a stranger named John Shooter turns up (played by John Turturro) claiming that Rainey has plagiarised his story, and not only that had ruined the ending. He utters an oath that it shall be put right – by Rainey. Bewildered, Mort (the name in itself is a clue) must find proof that the story is his, or bad things will start to happen.

Shooter obviously gets a bit bored of waiting though as bad things and worse things start happening anyway. Mort has no-one he can trust, except a private detective (he trusts you because you pay him lots of money), and possibly his nearly ex-wife. All in all, he probably wishes he hadn’t bothering answering the door that day.

Johnny Depp does a credible job as Rainey, and Turturro gives a chilling one as Shooter. Mario Bello is fine as his wife and Timothy Hutton is fine as the boyfriend, but really neither of those characters are remotely interesting. The whole film really relies on creating an atmosphere, but to me it was more a case of mild morbid fascination which turned into dull predictability once the main plot twist was out in the open. The film is quite gory in places, but really there were very few points during the film where I felt particularly interested in what was going on. Whether this is a fault of Stephen King’s original novel or writer / director David Koepp’s screenplay I couldn’t say, not having read the book, but the whole film including its bizarre final shot hinged on the twist and the ending, and somehow I just couldn’t care about either. Since I’m really not into horror movies I can only recall seeing one movie based on a King novel before; that was Thinner, which we watched as there really was nothing on at the cinema and we were already there (we’d misjudged the time and what we were going to see had already started… ooops…), which bored me rigid. At least this wasn’t quite as bad, there were a few mildly diverting aspects to it and one or two humorous moments near the beginning.

I have a nagging feeling that this film should have worked. It had a great cast, the cinematography was good, the musical score was okay, the premise was interesting. I think that if the film had more sympathetic characters, I might have cared more but the characters there were either strange, stupid, cruel or just hopeless. Half of them only got a couple of minutes of screen time, half of which was taken up with their death. Altogether, not a film about people! I guess that’s why I found it really didn’t work. The pacing seemed too slow as well, and the interval between the main build-up and (not so) shocking conclusion wasn’t judged very well. The annoying thing about it is, I was expecting to like this film. It sounded so interesting… but alas, it wasn’t to be. Also, it’s an utterly depressing movie. Not recommended!

Other Information

Rating: Rated PG-13 for violence/terror, sexual content and language. (UK rating 12A)
Runtime: 96 minutes



Related links:

Johnny Depp films I like a whole bunch more than this one (not hard, but the following are all well worth watching):

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest
Benny and Joon


See also: Top Ten Movies of 2004 (unsurprisingly, this isn’t in it…)


Recommended: No

Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older