91. One Hour Photo (2002) – Mark Romanek

An employee of a one-hour photo lab becomes obsessed with a young suburban family.

Mark Romanek’s psychological thriller One Hour Photo follows a cast aganist type Robin Williams (although he continued in this direction afterwards) as Sy Parrish, a lonely and depressed guy who works behind the counter of a 60 minute photo lab at a regular supermarket.

As many critics have noted “it does for photos what Psycho did for showers” it really makes you think about what happens when you drop off your personal photographs to a seemingly harmless worker. These processors must look at the photographs to develop them and the thought of somebody like Sy making an extra copy for himself and hanging them up on his living room wall is just so disturbing.

It really does make you think about the lonely people you see on the street, that you pass and talk to everyday. Much of the success of this movie is down to the great cinematography that is used throughout especially in the supermarket where Parrish works. It’s so brightly white and bland, it looks to be the most hideous supermarket ever invented. Sy just seems to be invisible in this environment, he gets engluffed by this supermarket, he is a non-entity.

Even though Sy is such a sick lead for the movie, the way he is subtly played by Robin Williams you can’t help but feel for him, even when he is at his worst. My favourite scene of the movie is when he is looking through some photographs of people long past away that are on sale in the town market and he goes into a deep monoglue over how important photographs are.

As he says they are often the first things saved in a fire, and after all when we and everybody we know are all dust the only thing left of us will be the photographs we have taken. Great movie.