Secret Window is a 2004 psychological horror/mystery thriller starring Johnny Depp in the main role. It was written and directed by David Koepp and it is based on the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden by Stephen King, which appeared in King's collection Four Past Midnight.
Plot[]
Author Mort Rainey catches his wife Amy having an affair with another man called Ted. After that he becomes depressed and suffering from writer's block. He also delays finalizing the later divorce and retreats to his cabin at Tashmore Lake in upstate New York.
There a man called Shooter appears and accuses him of plagiarizing. Since then a lot of strange, evil things, including murder and the burning of his previous house, happen. Finally Mort realizes that Shooter is just a figment of his imagination, a character of his own creation brought to life through Mort's undetected dissociative identity disorder, adopted to carry out malevolent tasks like burning his house that reminded him of his wife. For a last time he becomes Shooter, which in reality means Shoot her (his wife) for what she did, attracts her and also indirectly Ted to his cabin, kills them and buries them in his own garden.
After that Mort recovers from writer's block and experiences a mood improvement, but everyone fear him. Sheriff Newsome later stops by the cabin to tell Mort that he is the prime suspect in Amy and Ted's disappearances and that he will be caught sooner or later once the bodies are found. Additionally he tells him he is no longer welcome in town. He is not impressed while eating corn from a cornfield in his garden at the exact place where he buried both of them as part of a plan to destroy all the evidence of his crime this way.
Cast[]
- Johnny Depp as Morton "Mort" Rainey
- John Turturro as John Shooter
- Maria Bello as Amy Rainey
- Timothy Hutton as Ted "Teddy" Milner
- Len Cariou as Sheriff Dave Newsome
- Charles S. Dutton as Private Investigator Ken Karsch
- John Dunn Hill as Tom Greenleaf
- Matt Holland as Detective Bradley
Production[]
Part of Secret Window was filmed in the town of North Hatley, Quebec, in Canada. Other filming locations included Lake Massawippi, Lake Sacacomie, Lake Gale and the village of Bromont, Quebec. Finally, a part of it was also filmed in New York City, in the United States.
