Starring Johnny Depp and John Turturro. Rating 14A.

Secret Window takes you into the dark heart of Stephen King land, with familiar signposts of the author's oeuvre at almost every turn. There's the remote cabin by a lake, the mangy dog, the hick town full of class-A characters, and, of course, the tormented yet successful writer, rumpled and bespectacled and a lot like the horror master himself.

The story is a taut little character study gleaned from a somewhat forgettable novella, Secret Window, Secret Garden, in King's 1990 Four Past Midnight anthology. But the author's slimmer concoctions have yielded some of the richest movie renditions of his work, whether it's been The Shawshank Redemption or Stand by Me. Here, the film's success has as much, or more, to do with the acting and direction as with its raw material. Johnny Depp, who's making riotous eccentricity into an art form both on-screen and in real life these days, is the perfect foil to John Turturro (who hasn't had many fine moments since donning those overalls in O Brother, Where Art Thou?). Together they give this psychological thriller a comic edge it wouldn't have had otherwise. Meanwhile, writer-director David Koepp (Trigger Effect and Stir of Echoes) has just enough Hitchcockian flourish to raise Secret Window well above the tawdry trash heap of pedestrian adaptations like Needful Things or Apt Pupil. This film isn't full of the supernatural scares you might expect, but Koepp manages to invest everything from a ringing phone to an empty car-key rack with a sense of dread.

Depp's writer character, Mort, is shacked up alone in his cabin while he goes through a messy divorce. (She has the ritzy house in the city.) Rarely out of his ripped terry housecoat, he wastes his days in a blur of naps, Jack Daniel's, and blinking cursors. But then a strange man with a thick drawl and big black hat (a crazy-eyed Turturro) shows up at his door and demands that Mort admit he plagiarized one of this visitor's stories. The intruder insists on reparation, becoming increasingly hostile, acting on his threats, and leaving Mort feeling more than a little freaked-out in his window-filled retreat.

Mort's napaholic lifestyle allows Koepp to set the film in a disorienting nowhere between night and day. Using gorgeous wide-screen Super 35, he and cinematographer Fred Murphy capture the isolation and confinement that King tapped in Misery and Gerald's Game. But the film is easily as funny as it is scary: Depp has mastered the double take (check out the one when he's trying to report his stalker to a septuagenarian sheriff who's doing needlepoint to help his arthritis), and he's scorchingly sarcastic with his cornpone tormenter ("Always nice to meet a reader"). He has even invested his character with a ridiculous jaw-cracking twitch that he somehow pulls off.

As for King's story, the film stays pretty faithful to it, except for an altered finale that's a bit problematic and semipredictable. It's not that it ruins the film, which is stronger than it has any right to be, but ultimately it's one that chooses explicitness about the strange visitor's origins over the lingering mystery of the novella. The writer characters in Secret Window raise the importance of a book's ending again and again. And if you can't produce a mind-blowing closer with all that talk on the subject, that is one window that should not be opened.