Secret Window (2004)

Secret Window arrives from 2004, a year in which a studio thriller could still be about a man in a cabin being menaced by a stranger with a manuscript. David Koepp directs Johnny Depp as Mort Rainey, a mystery writer hollowed out by divorce, accused of plagiarism by a Mississippian named John Shooter. The premise is sturdy. The execution is competent. The cultural inventory is empty, by every measure available to us. Nobody in this film is asked to represent a demographic. Nobody delivers a speech. The camera lingers on the lake, the corn, the dog, and the film proceeds about its grim business without a single glance toward the audience's conscience.

The engine here is a familiar one: adultery, jealousy, a man's rage dressed up as persecution. Amy, the estranged wife, exists to have betrayed him and then to be punished for it. Maria Bello plays her with dignity, but the screenplay gives her nothing to do but absorb the consequences of the plot. When the twist lands, and Shooter proves to be a second self, the film treats dissociative identity as a mechanism for the third act, not a condition deserving of care or commentary. Charles S. Dutton appears as a private investigator, does his job, and is killed for it. The film does not pause to remark that he is the only Black man in the frame. He is not there to be remarked upon.

A viewer searching for a message will come away with nothing but a corpse and a corn patch. That is not a failing. It is a classification. Here is a film that wants only to unsettle you for ninety-six minutes and then release you, and it achieves this with a straight face and a fine score by Philip Glass. It is an artifact of a commercial era when a thriller could simply be a thriller. We note it, we file it, and we move on.