Secret Window

Wr & Dir: David Koepp
Starring : Johnny Depp, John Turturro, Maria Bello
USA 2004, Cert: 12A
Rt: 96 mins

Secret Window is about a suspense thriller about a prolific writer Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) who takes up residence in a countryside wood lodge to write his latest book. He’s going through a painful divorce from wife Amy (Bello). Suffering writer’s block, he gets a visit one day from a mysterious stranger John Shooter (John Turturro), an imposing man in a hat who may not be as eloquent as Mort with words, but a man who makes a serious claim that Mort stole his story in one of his earlier books. At first, Rainey dismisses Shooter’s claims seeking to prove beyond doubt that he wrote his novel before Shooter wrote his, but Shooter refuses to give up and worse, begins to show he will stop at nothing to get an acceptable result to this plagiarism question.

Secret Window is taken from a Stephen King novel and is enlivened by reasonable decent performances by Depp and Turturro. As a thriller it develops nicely with plenty of scary moments and a few interesting twists at the end. It’s worth seeing if you’re into tensely unhinged movies or merely curious to see how this Stephen King novel has been adapted. Koepp makes a pretty good job of it and is helped by his performers – Turturro exudes enough menace to be interesting (and makes good use of his weird black hat) and Depp is OK as the novel writer refusing to budge when this ‘opportunist’ (as he sees him) comes-a-calling.

Matt Arnoldi