Stalking Shop

ROBIN WILLIAMS'S DARK REBIRTH IN ONE HOUR PHOTO

Is ickiness the flip side of elfin sanctimony? That would seem to be the case with Robin Williams, who has been beavering away on-screen this year re-inventing himself as a creep, first with Death to Smoochy, in which he played a homicidal children's-TV host, then with the overrated Insomnia, in which he played a homicidal novelist, and now in One Hour Photo, the winner of the bunch, in which he plays a potentially homicidal Photomat guy. The trick of this beautifully controlled performance—has Williams been accused of that before?—is in the way he lets all that life-affirming, PatchAdams-y goodness curdle before our eyes. The script posits him as a lonely but untalented Geppetf to who, unable to whittle his own little boy, instead becomes an apple-cheeked stalker, his prey being a seemingly perfect upper-middle-class family that's granted him unwitting access to all its banal, yet terribly revealing, Kodak moments. Mark Romanek, who made his name shooting videos for Nine Inch Nails, wrote and directed One Hour Photo—and how come no one thought of this wonderfully unsettling premise before, which will likely do for snapshots what Psycho did for showers? When you see a knife-wielding Williams order a woman to put her boyfriend's "thing" in her mouth, you may think that the movie has gone a bit off its rocker, but you'll also know the merry old Robin is dead and gone to hell. How nice to be cringing with him. (Rating: ★★★14)

BRUCE HANDY