Stephen King Month: Secret Window

4 Stars - Entertaining

Stephen King writes about authors a lot, many of his books have author main characters, that are often in some way an analogy of King himself, like today's story stars a writer who creates a character so real that he seems alive. Today is Secret Window, based on the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden from the collection Four Past Midnight.

Secret Window, Secret Garden tells the story of Mort Rainey, an author with writer's block, no doubt caused by his depression following his separation from his wife. One day he receives a mysterious visitor named John Shooter, who claims that he wrote a story that Rainey wrote several years before him, Rainey of course denies this claim and tells Shooter to leave him alone. Shooter has no intention of doing any such thing, he starts to use dark methods such as murdering Rainey's cat and burning down his wife's house to intimidate Rainey into telling the truth. All these events and the contact from his wife and her new boyfriend drive Rainey's sanity to it's very limits until he learns the horrible truth.

This is a very entertaining film with great central performances from Johnny Depp and John Turturro, who really play off each other very well and make for a likeable main character and an intimidating villain. No doubt the screenplay and the direction give this film some of it's entertainment value as at just over an hour and a half it absolutely flies by and you enjoy it all the time, is it scary? Not really, is it fun? You bet.

As an adaptation it is very solid up until the end where a fairly substantial change is made, however this is one of those rare times where I prefer the end of the film to the end of the book as it is far more deliciously dark.

Right Time. Wrong Place.

In short, a good film, I'd say well worth a watch.