2004’s Secret Window is yet another lazy adaptation of a Stephen King story. A writer, Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp), is holed away in a cabin in the woods. He struggles to sign the divorce papers from his soon to be ex-wife (Maria Bello). Even though he was the one that caught her cheating? He filed the divorce papers, but struggles signing them? But I digress. He’s struggling signing the papers when a deadpan, Amish-adjacent, man (John Turturro) shows up to tell him that he plagiarized a story. The rest of the story unfolds in a dull, extremely predictable way.

For a film that literally has the word “secret” in the title, it’s unbelievably surface level. It’s very obvious what is happening from the very first frame of John Turturro on screen. I kept thinking, “this cannot be what is going to happen.” I legitimately thought that it was so obvious that it must have been some sort of red herring. But it was not. It plays out exactly how you think it will. In fact, it basically drops the B-plot of the divorce and finding his copy of the story in order to better serve the predictability. Then it just hams it in for the last third of the film.

John Turturro is evil for the sake of being evil and Johnny Depp is zany as ever. That’s about it. Depp does do a good job though. He is about the only thing keeping the film afloat. But even then, he did not have much to work with. The story is just simply too flat to carry any substance. I give Secret Window a 1.5 out of 4. The movie is watchable, sure… But is it worth it? Nah. The plot is about as shallow as the grave Mort Rainey digs for his wife in this movie. And the rest of the film is about as dull as the sheriff must have been to not see her feet poking out of Rainey’s new garden.