One-Hour Photo

The title of this film alludes to the rapid service offered by the photolab where protagonist Sy ('the Photo Guy') Parrish works, but the film itself has been somewhat longer in development - it is over fifteen years since writer/director Mark Romanek debuted with his previous project, innovative indie weirdfest 'Static'. Yet the wait has been worthwhile, as 'One Hour Photo' is an intelligent and original study of the mind of a stalker, and of the nature of photography, which is guaranteed to get under your skin.

The film's thematic obsession with photographs is evident from the outset. The opening image is photographic - a set of police mugshots of Sy (Robin Williams). In handcuffs, Sy is interviewed by Detective James van der Zee (Eriq LaSalle) about some photos which he has taken ('not pretty pictures'), and asked 'What was it about William Yorkin that upset you so?'. The rest of the film comprises Sy's account of his life and of the past few weeks' events. He is a sad, lonely figure, who pursues his work with a professionalism bordering on the obsessive, and who compensates for his own life's emptiness by imagining himself as part of the picture-perfect life of regular customers, the Yorkin family, copies of whose photographs decorate the otherwise bare walls of his apartment. When within the space of a few days he is both fired from his beloved job and faced with the harsh reality behind the Yorkins' apparently blissful domestic situation, something in Sy cracks, and he decides to make a more active, aggressive contribution to the photographic record of those around him.

Under Romanek's capable direction, even the most banal and familiar settings - a park, a house toilet, the aisles of a Savmart store, a hotel room - have been imbued with a sense of rising menace. In keeping with Sy's character, his everyday routine at work and at home is depicted with an anal sense of detail, but this dryness is constantly offset by the viewer's awareness of a coming crime (the precise nature of which is not disclosed until the end), and by the gradual, casual revelation of some of the more unsavoury aspects of Sy's inner life. While all the actors in 'One Hour Photo' are superb, in the end they merely orbit around Robin Williams' central performance. It is because of Robin Williams' extraordinary turn here as a loser doomed since childhood, that this film manages to be as much a tragedy as it is a horror film. The role of Sy - balding, beige, beastly - is unflattering, but Williams takes to it like developing fluid to film, creating a complex image of a man who earns our sympathy at the same time as our revulsion.
Thoroughly recommended.

Anton Bitel