‘You know, the only thing that matters is the ending…’
When I first saw Secret Window back in 2004 as a teenager, I thought it was pretty good. Rewatching it in 2026 confirms that it is, in fact, pretty shabby. The discrepancy is a reflection of two things. One, this film hasn’t aged well, and two, I was a fat idiot with bad opinions back in 2004…
Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) is a successful mystery writer living in his seasonal cabin in upstate New York after finding his wife (Maria Bello) in bed with another man (Timothy Hutton). One day, out of the blue, John Shooter (John Turturro), a strange man from the deep south sporting a wide-brimmed black hat and a scowl of disdain, shows up at Mort’s door claiming that he stole a story from him and passed it off as his own many years previously.
David Koepp is one of the most successful Hollywood writers ever. He wrote most of the films in the Jurassic Park franchise, the original Mission: Impossible and the first film in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. As a director, however, his record is spotty to say the least. Stir of Echoes has its fans, but other than that, his career behind the camera has been unremarkable. Secret Window, an adaptation of Stephen King‘s novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, arrived in 2004 when Johnny Depp was arguably at the peak of his powers, and while it made more than double its $40 million budget at the box office, it has been largely forgotten about since.
Depp, in fact, is one of the problems here. Secret Window is not supposed to be a comedic story, either on film or on the page, but he plays Mort with his trademark charm and caustic wit. It doesn’t work. Depp never gets a handle on Mort’s descent, his spiral into paranoia and confusion. The film also arrived in that moment post-Fight Club, in which there were so many films that share the same twist as this story. Elsewhere, Turturro, a fine actor, also struggles. Despite the heinous acts that he commits, Turturro’s John Shooter never really feels menacing. This is partly because we never see him actually do anything evil (for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who knows the twist), and partly because the character as written is faintly ridiculous, but either way, the only thing in Secret Window that feels authentic is Mort’s relationship with his wife, and her relationship with her lover (Dutton is probably the best thing about this movie in the moments in which he appears).
Secret Window is not a dull film; it’s the cinematic equivalent of an airport novel. It passes the time just fine, but ultimately, there is no substance to it and the performances don’t ring true.
