One Hour Photo

Robin Williams has done unintentionally skin-crawling movies in his time (the unholy trinity of Jack, Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man leap screaming to mind), but this is his first deliberate foray into psycho thriller territory. It's a clever move.

Williams plays Sy Parrish, the chief clerk at the photo-development counter of a large supermarket. This anonymous man has no personal life, so lives vicariously through the snapshots of his customers. Especially the apparently perfect Yorkin family: mum Nina (Nielsen), dad Will (Vartan) and little son Jake (Smith). But what will happen when Sy discovers that the Yorkin's home life isn't as idyllic as he thinks?

Mark Romanek has created a film painful in its bleak, penetrating clarity. Using beautifully framed images (the sterile whiteness of the supermarket, the amber warmth of the Yorkin house, the chilly emptiness of Sy's apartment) to peel back the layers of Sy's life, he reveals a man driven to madness by simple loneliness.

Unlike conventional psycho-thrillers from Basic Instinct to the likes of lazy efforts like The Watcher and Swimfan, One Hour Photo doesn't try to slather a cheap sexual motive or some twisted revenge ethos onto Sy's actions. This man is forced to extremes not because he wishes to be better than everybody else, but because he wants to be the same as them.

Don't assume, though, that Romanek's empathy with his lead character makes the film in any way soft. With more than its fair share of heart-pummelling edge-of-seat moments, most in a nerve-twanging final 30 minutes, this is a highly accomplished thriller.

In front of the camera, Nielsen and Vartan pitch their performances expertly as the superficially happy couple, while Gary Cole and Eric La Salle (of 'ER' fame) turn in rounded, intelligent turns as, respectively, Sy's corporate-minded boss and a soft-spoken police detective. But there's no getting around the fact that it's Williams' film.

Grey of hair and pudgy of midrift, Williams doesn't so much play Sy as become him. On screen for three-quarters of the film, he marries the character's surface creepiness to a sweet, vulnerable core, before stealthily drip-feeding violence and menace into him. The end result is a screen psycho you fear for as much as you fear. It's a fantastic performance.