The Safe House - Expositions

ONE HOUR PHOTO (R). Robin Williams is startling and chilling as a photo processor with a sicko fixation on an attractive young family. Mark Romanek's creepy, oddly humane debut thriller is not your usual Williams day at the beach: Leave the automatic laugh track at home. With Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan. 1:38 (sexual content and language). Sony Lincoln Square, UA Union Square, Manhattan.

Robin Williams has been ripping away at his Mr. Nice Guy image over the past year like some maniacal wrecking crew that has been hired to distress a pristine building into resembling a ruin. Out with the jolly pediatricians and the weepy robots, in with the misanthropic children's show hosts and the calculating killers. And just so we know he means business, throw in a stand- up comedy tour and bullet-spray foul language up to the second balconies of the nation's finest concert halls.

All of this seems like a warm-up for Seymour Parrish, the smoldering cipher he plays in "One Hour Photo.” Williams pulls the rug out from under his career and his longtime fans in this nervy and nerve-rattling thriller, submerging his manifold antic faces to disappear completely into the skin of an invisible man.

The outline of Mark Romanek's potent directorial debut reads like an expressionist fable hatched by Rod Serling: There was a colorless little man who drove a colorless little car, wore colorless little clothes and worked in a colorless little office. Indeed, the only color in his gray little apartment was in the family snapshots smothering his living room wall. The thing is, they weren't his snapshots.

Seymour "Sy” Parrish takes great pride in his work developing photographs at a superstore one-hour photo service. Bereft of any family or social life himself, he dotes on the Yorkins, an attractive couple and their 8-year-old son, Jakob. They call him "Sy the Photo Guy” (a nickname that is less affectionate than it is dismissive). Sy devotes extra care in the double sets of photos he processes for them, furtively making a third set that he keeps for himself. For Sy, the Yorkins represent the fantasy family he never had, and he desperately wants in.

"One Hour Photo” is itself a kind a time-lapse snapshot of the moment when Sy's simmering pathology boils over into a demonic obsession. His avuncular interest in young Jakob (Dylan Smith) takes the form of an amiable stalking; he insinuates his way into the lunch-hour company of Mrs. Yorkin (an excellent Connie Nielsen) in a romantic-comedy-like ruse to ingratiate himself with the family; and, in a demented pique, anoints himself avenging angel when he finds out that Mr. Yorkin (Michael Vartan) is having an affair.

If "One Hour Photo” has the air of an extended "Twilight Zone” episode, then it is a very canny one. What makes Sy's sickness so particularly creepy is that, for a good part of the way, at least, it keeps one foot in a common human impulse: the tendency to falsely idealize the supporting characters in our lives. If Romanek's script makes any missteps, it is when it tries to explain away Sy's behavior by having him confess his childhood traumas to a sympathetic Jakob.

Romanek's design concept -- contrasting Sy's monochromatic universe with the splashy Crayola innocence of Jakob -- seems similarly flat-footed at first, but it works as an abstraction of how Sy sees the world. Encouraged by a nerd mask of henna-tinted hair and aviator glasses, Williams transforms himself into a shuffling pile of damaged goods, eating crow before a patronizing boss and consoling himself at home with "The Simpsons” and a bowl of cold cereal. It's a total performance. As radical career makeovers go, "One Hour Photo” atones for a multitude of sins.

Note: There's a video interview with Robin Williams on the Newsday website.

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