One Hour Photo

Mark Romanek, USA, 2002, 98 minutes

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the word "snapshot" was originally a hunting term.

Seymour “Sy” Parrish, a blonde and balding Robin Williams, works at a photo counter in a shopping mall, processing people’s lives in 24 exposure moments. He obsesses about the quality of the pictures, taking extreme care to provide the best service possible, to get the perfect prints for the customers that he cares for. As events proceed we realise that Sy is an emotional voyeur, using other’s photographs as a surrogate family, wishing that he was part of them, inside their homes, inside their lives, replacing the depressing reality that surrounds him. His apartment, sterile and devoid of any personality, is filled with the photographs of one family, the Yorkins, a middle class suburban nuclear family, as far from Sy as possible, his perfect dream life. Things begin to become unpleasant when Sy finds that Will Yorkin (Michael Vartan) is having an affair with a co-worker; Sy decides to save “his” family.

A stalker thriller, the film watches as the socially retarded Sy (Robin Williams in his best performance for years) yearns for the loving, middle class lifestyles that he sees in the photographs he develops, striving to get closer to them in the only ways he can. It is beautifully conceived, Mark Romanek steers clear of many of the yearning pitfalls that we expect the film to descend into, managing to deliver a conclusion that is insightful and surprisingly original. The visual style belays Romanek’s promo director past (he has directed videos for Nine Inch Nails, Madonna and Macy Gray), the scenes are beautifully set, cleanly and precisely, with an artistic continuity that is rather wonderful. The music is nicely fitting, strings and xylophone pieces, giving the proceedings an air of serene surreality, accompanied by intelligent use of sound to highlight the intensity of the onscreen events.

One Hour Photo is great, a large budget, mainstream movie that manages to be entertaining and aesthetically pleasing and hopefully it will, along with Insomnia, allow us to forgive Robin Williams for the last five years.

Review by George Williamson
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2003