Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" forced us to identify with Janet Leigh's character from the very beginning. She's in almost every frame, and we have a lot of shots from her point of view. This, her murder, roughly two thirds of the way through the film came as a real shocker.

In "The Secret Window" we are caused to identify with Stephen King's manifestation in Mort Raimey, Johnny Depp. That is, we see a lot of things through his eyes. And he talks to himself (ie., the audience). And we are made to feel that injustices are heaped upon him -- he catches his wife in the sack with Timothy Hutton and some backwoods loony accuses him of plagiarism and threatens his life.

So far it's rather like Marion Crane in drag. But what would "Psycho" have been if Marion Crane, instead of Anthony Perkins, had turned out to be the murderer with multiple personality? That's more or less what happens here. Depp begins as a rather ordinary guy, an author with writer's block, spending the summer in a comfortable old lakeside cabin in Connecticut. He has all sorts of endearing human traits. He's slothful, dresses in a ripped robe, and is doing his best to quit smoking in the middle of divorce proceedings. The persecution by John Turturro, against whom he is legally and physically helpless, trap him into a Paul Sheldon mold, out of King's "Misery." But then, following a couple of murders, he begins not only to talk to himself but to visualize his other self. He holds complete conversations with his other self, who patiently explains that he, Mort Rainey, is the arsonist and murderer, and that the Turturro character is only a hallucination. He becomes as nutty as a Granola bar and as violent as Jack Torrance in "The Shining." There's even an ax involved, and a replay of the "Redrum" device in which "Shooter" turns into "Shoot Her." The first part of the movie is okay. The production design is accomplished. The many plot holes begin about the time Mort Rainey's dog, Chico, is killed by the loony with a screwdriver. If Turturro's character is made up by Rainey as a way of showing his evil side without having to recognize it, which turns out to be the case, then why would Rainey kill his own dog? It gets more complicated until the end, which yields almost complete confusion. Eating a crop of fresh corn that is growing out of your wife's grave is gruesome but doesn't add to the plot or tell us anything we needed to know.

As King's movies go, this one is photographed and acted well, and it looks right. But there is a crazy logic to, say, "Misery" that's lacking here. I can understand a writer being trapped in a fruitcake's bed with a pair of broken legs, but I can't begin to get inside Mort Rainey's skin. Mediocre.