The Safe House - Expositions

Acclaimed video director Mark Romanek makes his feature film debut with this twisted human drama, which showcases Robin Williams's vast talents as a performer, and allows him to finally escape the strait-jacket of the wise-cracking all-American everyman. If you thought the funnyman's portrayal of a conniving killer in Insomnia was chilling, then brace yourselves.

In One Hour Photo, he plays a sociopath, who will stop at nothing to protect his vision of perfection. Seymour 'Sy' Parrish (Williams) is a lonely technician who mans the local Sav-Mart one-hour photo booth. He has no family to speak of, nor friends, apart from his eager-to-please assistant Yoshi (Paul H Kim), who is being groomed to take over the tiny empire. Sy often clashes with his boss, Bill Owens (Gary Cole), and would probably be sacked were it not for his unparalleled expertise with the photo booth machinery. Unlike many of Sav-Mart's employees, Sy takes his work extremely seriously, and his spends hours making sure each print has exactly the right mix of colour, light and shade.

More than anything, however, Sy craves human contact, and so he develops an obsessive relationships with his customers, particularly the Yorkin family, inventing fictitious relationships with each family member, especially wife Nina (Connie Nielsen) and her young son Jake (Dylan Smith). His fixation drives him to make duplicates of their photographs, which he blue-tacks to the walls of his empty apartment, and to park outside the Yorkin house late at night, and stare longingly at the family he can never have.

When Nina's handsome husband, Will (Michael Vartan), dares to threaten the sanctity of the family unit, Sy takes his infraction very seriously indeed, and resolves to deal out his own form of punishment.

To elaborate further would spoil the hairpin twists and turns of the final half hour, which sends the film careering into dark, unsettling territory. In many ways, One Hour Photo recalls the critically lambasted Jim Carrey film The Cable Guy, which attempted to showcase its leading man as a serious actor. While Carrey couldn't carry off the illusion, Williams does with aplomb, delivering a sensational performance, which simultaneously inspires fear and sympathy for his lonely stalker. At heart, all Seymour wants, is the security, warmth and love of the family unit. It's just the methods he chooses to achieve his goal which chill the blood.

"When we look through our photo albums, we're seeing a record of only the happy, moments in our lives... No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget," he laments at one point, hinting at the great emotional void of his life.

Nielsen, Vartan and youngster Smith provide sterling support, as does Cole as the Sav-Mart manager who gets on the wrong side of Seymour, and pays a sickening price. Romanek's direction is superb, though never showy, and he sustains the tension beautifully, cross-cutting between reality and Seymour's fantasy world. At the end of the day, it's difficult to know which is scarier.

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