One Hour Photo (2002)

For the past year at work I have walked past this movie countless times without taking it home to watch, well I finally watched it and was blown away.

Robin Williams is the perfect example of a comedian who plays serious roles just as well as his roles in comedy.
Here, he plays Seymour Parrish or "Sy, the photo guy", he works in the photo department of SavMart where he prints customers photos for them, he is a lonely employee who over the years has grown attached to one particular family.

So you can imagine when Sy discovers that the husband is cheating that he does everything in his power to right the wrong, only Sy's way of righting the wrong is an extreme one.

Still of Robin Williams in One Hour Photo

Towards the end of the film we are given an insight into Sy's mind when he asks a few questions of the detective interrogating him, through these questions we understand why Sy is a lonely and detached from the world because of how he was treated as a child, its this abuse he suffered at the hands of his father.

This movie shows perfectly how loneliness can in fact affect a person's mental state and cause them to perform heinous acts,  in Sy's mind he was doing nothing wrong, only punishing injustice.

The ending was not a traditional one, there was no murder or a last minute save by the police. Sy clinically set his victims up and made them pay for the sin they had committed by making them perform what must have been the acts that his father had made him perform as a child.

The hour and a half this movie runs for will fly by, make sure you check it out.

8.5/10