Secret Window (2004) is a psychological thriller movie, starring Johnny Depp and John Turturro. It was written and directed by David Koepp, based on the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden by Stephen King, featuring a musical score by Philip Glass. The story appeared in King’s collection Four Past Midnight. The film’s studio is Columbia Pictures along with Sony Pictures.
Johnny Depp plays successful writer Mort Rainey, who is suffering from writer’s block and has retreated to an isolated lakeside cabin in the face of a divorce from his wife, Amy (Maria Bello), following his discovery of his wife cheating on him with Ted Milner (Timothy Hutton, who starred as Thad Beaumont, in the similarly themed Stephen King movie The Dark Half), now her boyfriend. Living alone in the woods, Mort is confronted one day by the mysterious John Shooter (John Turturro) who accuses him of plagiarism. Shooter gives Mort a manuscript he claims to have written.
At first, Mort regards Shooter as mentally ill and throws away the book. But his maid takes it out of the garbage believing it was his and instead of throwing it away again he cannot stop thinking about it, and finally reads it. It is almost exactly the same. The movie follows Mort’s struggles to prove conclusively to Shooter and to himself that he has not plagiarized the story. Shooter continually harasses Mort and later kills his dog, an Australian Cattle Dog named Chico. As the story progresses, Mort hires a private investigator (Charles S. Dutton) and asks the help of the local sheriff, who doesn’t believe him. The investigator asks if there are any witnesses, and Mort remembers a local man saw them together. But Shooter then murders both the investigator and the man and leaves them in a car. Mort then pushes the car into the river, since he thinks the murders will be pinned on him. Shooter also burns down the house of Mort’s soon-to-be ex-wife. Mort is convinced that Ted is the culprit responsible for the burning.
Mort eventually locates the magazine that proves he published “Secret Window” before Shooter wrote “Sowing Season.” He goes to the post office, where he gets the story. But when he gets out of his car, the sheriff approaches him with a smirk asking him if he could ask a few questions. Mort then leaves. But when Mort gets the magazine, he finds that the story has been cut out. Mort’s inner voice tells him that since the magazine was sent to him in a sealed UPS package, Shooter could not have tampered with it. Prompting from his own conscience leads Mort to the realization that Shooter is not real, only a figment of Mort’s imagination brought so vividly to life through undetected dissociative identity disorder to personify the dark side of Mort’s personality and to commit acts that Mort himself feels he could not commit (murder and arson). During this revelation, his concerned ex-wife drives up to his cabin, and at that instant he changes his persona from the well-meaning Mort to the murderous Shooter. When his ex-wife walks in he is gone. She starts searching the house for Mort and finds an almost empty bottle of Jack Daniels on a table. We later learn that when influenced by Jack Daniels, Mort’s second personality “Shooter” comes alive. All over the walls she sees inscriptions of the word “shooter”. She realizes after Mort reveals himself that “shooter” actually means “shoot her”. After she realizes this she tries to run away but Mort is too quick for her. He then kills his ex-wife and her lover, Ted, with a shovel and buries them in a garden where he later plants a crop of corn. Afterwards, Mort changes profoundly – his writer’s block is finally over and his passion for life returns. The movie, however, ends on a rather sinister note. The local sheriff informs Mort that he knows what he did and as soon as they find the bodies, he’ll go to prison. Mort dismisses the statement nonchalantly, and replies that “The ending is the most important part of the story. This one is very good. This one is perfect.” It is then revealed to us that by growing and consuming corn from the garden where his ex-wife and her lover are buried, Mort is slowly trying to destroy all the evidence needed to incriminate him.
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