Having caught his wife, Amy, in the arms of her impossibly smug lover Ted, best-selling novelist Mort Rainey takes up residence at his remote lakeside retreat where, in between endless catnaps and bags of crisps, he attempts to draft his next book.
On top of Amy's angst-causing telephone calls, Mort receives an unexpected visit from a menacing Mississippi hick named John Shooter who claims Mort has plagiarised his story The Secret Window and, even more aggravatingly, changed his perfect ending.
If Mort doesn't do the decent thing and amend it accordingly, then John will set about carving a bloody path of retribution through his life, threatening everyone and everything he holds dear.
Unfortunately for Mort, John Turturo's Shooter isn't all mouth and no trousers and is actually quite adept with a variety of implements including a screwdriver.
Cue Depp's excellently portrayed spiral into the sort of nightmare that seems to bedevil log cabin owners everywhere.
As you would expect from a film that's crafted on the back of a Stephen King novella, Secret Window is a masterly example of how best to walk an audience along a knife-edge of tension. You don't get to relax very often in this movie but you don't tend to mind when an ending is as unexpected and delicious as this.
7.5/10
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