More than 20 years on, Johnny Depp’s only Stephen King movie is now a streaming hit

Stephen King adaptations have a habit of being magnets for big-name actors – over the years, you get everyone from Jack Nicholson to Kathy Bates, Tom Hanks, and even Tim Robbins giving us their best haunted-by-trauma faces. But here's an odd one: Johnny Depp only ever turned up for one trip through King-land. You'd think the author's obsession with dodgy writers having meltdowns would have made Depp a shoo-in for the role of a lifetime, given the man's career is practically built on playing blokes who fall to bits in curious ways. But, nope – just the one time, and most people barely noticed it when it happened.

Secret Window is now in the worldwide streaming top five on HBO Max, two decades after its muted cinema run.

Depp's Lone King Outing

This outlier is Secret Window, a 2004 psychological thriller that adapts King's novella Secret Window, Secret Garden (plucked from the Four Past Midnight collection). It's a short, sharp 96-minute affair, directed by David Koepp – the same bloke who penned Jurassic Park and Panic Room, so not exactly a lightweight. Depp stars as Mort Rainey, a writer in an existential rut, hiding out in a lakeside cabin after his marriage goes sideways. Enter John Turturro, dialling up the Southern menace, accusing Mort of pinching "his story" and then basically harassing him until things get distinctly life-and-death. Cue dead dogs, torched houses, and Depp muttering to himself in a dressing gown for the better part of 90 minutes. The score, by Philip Glass and Geoff Zanelli, does a sterling job of keeping everything twitchily off-kilter.

Rounding out the cast are Maria Bello, Timothy Hutton, and Charles S. Dutton. But honestly, the film's appeal is just Depp coming unglued in increasingly eccentric fashion. Koepp keeps the film tight, mostly set between two blokes talking and things slowly going off the rails. There's a twisty ending that some will call out straight away, others might not – your mileage may vary.

Streaming Resurrection

On release, critics weren't exactly wowed – it sits at 46% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a C+ CinemaScore suggesting audiences weren't leaping out their seats either. That didn't stop it pulling in $92.1 million globally on a $40 million budget, though, so not quite a flop. Roger Ebert was unusually generous, giving it three stars and going as far as to say:

It could add up to a straight-faced thriller about things that go boo in the night, but Johnny Depp and director David Koepp ... have too much style to let that happen.

All things considered, it's a pulpy, slightly daft thriller that leans heavily on its stars – but here's the kicker: two decades later, Secret Window has climbed into the global top five on HBO Max. That's with Halloween in full swing and a bunch of new King projects (like IT: Welcome to Derry) clogging up the platform, so old catalogue titles are having a moment. Between that, and a new generation who seem to find Depp-at-the-end-of-his-tether endlessly watchable, critics probably slept on this one. Oh, and if Max isn't your thing, it's also up on Netflix and free-with-ads on Tubi in the States.