Evil in the dark room

One Hour Photo is a very well-made thriller. It shows us Robin Williams extending his acting range into unusual and disturbing material. And as well as causing acute anxiety in its last reels - whether or not it'll turn into a blood bath - it delivers a more moral message than most of its kind.

It's written and directed by Mark Romanek, who rightly says he was influenced by the "lonely man" thrillers of the Seventies such as The Conversation, Taxi Driver and Antonioni's The Passenger. It unnerves you so well because of its "ordinary" setting and the fact that its key figure is someone we could all meet - and probably have.

Sy Parrish (Robin Williams with thinned hair, clear aviator glasses, colourless clothes and a concentration and civility, both convivial and creepy) works at Savmart, a giant shopping mall in the San Fernando Valley, developing and printing home snapshots. "Snapshot", he tells us, originated as an 18th century blood-sports term - a "snap shot" at game birds, taken without aim. Only Sy Parrish's aim is very clear.

Early on, it's revealed that he "dupes" the snaps taken by a happy little family - husband, wife and nine-year-old son - living in leafy Brentwood. Sy pins these to his own sparely furnished apartment wall and fantasises a place for himself among this perfect family. So far, so harmless. But Williams's minimalist performance, developed with meticulous ambiguity, withholds clues to his intentions and thus stretches one's nerves more and more tightly.

The ordinary daily comings and goings within the huge store, a place which stacks its goods in soulless rows like a photorealist painting, are superficially cordial but basically inimical to human communication. Jeff Cronenweth's flat lighting casts no shadows, but an old dark house has sometimes looked homelier.

Such a film is hard to review, lest one spoils people's anticipation. But the story picks up darker notes when Williams gets the sack and simultaneously finds that the happiness and togetherness of his "ideal" family are being threatened from within.

If I hadn't known who Mark Romanek was - an ex-music-video director, if you please, partnered here by Pamela Koffler and Christine Vachon, who produced Stonewall and I Shot Andy Warhol - I'd have sworn his name was an alias for Paul Schrader. The picture has a puritan drive, a Calvinist sense of justifiable retribution, typical of Schrader films such as American Gigolo, Blue Collar and especially Hard Core.

At one point, there's a queasy feeling that the film is going to enter paedophilia territory, with Williams stalking the family and possibly "grooming" the kid. I'll reveal that this is a false trail, lest it puts anyone off enjoying Parrish's terrifying, but plausible, recoil when his fantasy world is destroyed, leaving him "out of the picture", in every sense of the phrase.

Voyeurism provides a strong narrative pull: not surprising in a film where the photo-image supplies the motivation as well as vindication for abnormal acts. Its success, though, rests solidly on the truthfulness of two basic ironies. One is that home snapshots invariably show only happy families and conceal the realityof what may be going on. The other is that handing the reel of film to someone such as Parrish, to develop and print, makes an outsider privy to intimacies that he has no right to see, but may feel he's participating in.

The film's last few moments are touching because they confirm how "happy snaps" are the alternative reality of Sy's childhood. We never even see his photo album. As Tolstoy might have put it, all happy family snapshots are the same, no unhappy family ones are - they simply don't exist.

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