I can see you now. Review on Secret Window Movie

A window has a number of meanings; an architectural gap that can be used to view the outside from the inside; a gap created for people to book tickets for travel from; a deliberate opening where you can spy inside and keep a vigil of the outside from inside!!

The last kind of windows are generally very mind based and they cannot be seen, but a lot of movement can planned and plotted!!

Based on Stephen Kings' novel, Secret Window, Secret Garden, David Koepp, Director, has done full justice to the pace, absurdity and at times jolts of horrifying shocks that are a trademark to Kings writings...

Troubled writer Mort Rainey, Johnny Depp, lives by himself in a cottage by the river in a very dishevelled way, unorganised, filthy and to a large extent unclean surroundings that seem dark and even unkempt to enter at first glance... In short a life of a recluse who doesn't care about self existence and the basics in leading a normal civic life!!

He is estranged... His wife Amy Rainey, Maria Bello, has left him and is currently living in the same town with her second lover, Ted Milner, Timothy Hutton. She has cheated on Mort!!

As a writer, Mort has accustomed himself to a life despondency and sloth... Its more like an abuse to his wife to make her grovel, which in actual never happens! All this ghastly silence gets shattered when John Shooter, John Turturro appears at his doorstep one fine day and just calmly claims, "you have stolen my story"... His claim is that he had left a story behind which Mort is writing Secret Window and is an absolute word to word copy of what he has written!! John's appearance is also quite forbidding, he is tall, with a black wide brimmed hat and has a deep rumbling baritone of a man who means nothing but business. He is in short menacing...

*The Plot

Its really very simple; We are given a beautiful picture of whats to come when you see the first frame of the film where the camera moves very smoothly spans in wide zoom across a lake and takes you to a very rustic looking cottage, where it closes on the banks and then moves stealthily across to a window and from inside it takes you on a tour of the cottage till it stops on a mirror where we see reflection of a man sleeping with a wide hat and a pack of cigarettes... When the camera zooms further, we are not looking at the reflection but are in the room real time... This smooth transition from a surreal activity to realism is literally like a jolt of the things to come.*

John Shooter, stalks Mort because he thinks that Mort has stolen his story. In reality Mort has very recently erased the only para that he had written from his computer and thats when things just go awfully haywire!! He gets accused, then there is a morbid fear of attacks from the John front because John Shooter as his name suggests is a very violent man and he means business!!

Meanwhile, Mort has murdered his own wife and buried her into her favorite garden, when Shooter accuses him of stealing and that leads Mort back into the same backyard where...

*So what happens next??

Well I am not going to let that out at all...

David Koepp and Johnny Depp are a pair and they make a real good one at that... **David is adept at portraying fear, panic situations and even inject shocking situations at times when you dont expect them!! David Koepp is the writer of "Panic Room"...

Johnny Depp is an amazing actor. His timing in displaying fear, horror and even slight angst in situations is done with such expertise that you cannot visualise any other actor in his place!!He dispalys such tenacity in the harrowed writer role of Morty that you feel Mort is existing in that lake cottage and is really petrified with John Shooter and is frustrated with his wife and life together. He talks to himself, he talks to his dog and keeps a running rumble of cacophony that can tell you the mortal fear he lives with or the perpetual frustration that he experiences!!

David has in other words concocted a very Hitchcockian type of underdog, who has been wrongly accused of stealing a story that he did not do, and the mortal fear of John stalking and turning up at Morts doorsteps at the most inopportune times manages to create a situation of anticipation amongst us viewers. **The cottage in which Mort stays serves up a ceremony of situations, its lonely, morbid and at the same time so still that anything can crack its surface anytime. Strange omens, disturbing sounds creating situations of deliberate panic and add to it the threatening letters, light bulbs that crack all of a sudden are all perfect reminiscences of something thats about to happen.

Morts friends are also not typical, they include a bodyguard, an ex- cop Charles Dutton to protect him against the unannounced attacks of John Shooter alongwith the local sheriffLen Cariou. The kind of violence that is portrayed by Shooter extends to brutally kill Mort's dog with a screw driver through his heart and that sums up Mort's friends!!

This is one film which creeps up silently and as it rolls along provides us with the visual delights of fear filled drama and the thrills of whats coming next through Morts window. Its not your regular crime drama, its a little mental and makes you think whats happening in Morts life real time.