YMMV / Secret Window

• Actor Allusion: Timothy Hutton played the main character in The Dark Half, another Stephen King work about a writer bringing a murderous alter ego to life.
• Adaptation Displacement: It is based of Stephen King 's novella Secret Window, Secret Garden, and some details (with King's blessing) were changed in the process, most notably the ending.
• Genius Bonus: Mort begins to stretch and click his jaw more and more frequently as the story goes on. This is an actual symptom of schizophrenia.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The way Amy treats Mort can come off as abusive at worst, eerily foreshadowing what Depp would endure with Amber Heard.
  • The harshness goes both ways, as Mort's own behavior (pulling a gun on his wife and her lover, violently attacking them), echoes the disturbing allegations against Depp himself.
• Jerkass Woobie: Mort. He's easilly irritable, grumpy and later revealed a dissociative murderer but he's also been undeservedly cheated by his wife which is also pressuring him into sign the divorce paper like nothing bad happened. In some flashbacks we also found out that Mort was a loving and caring husband so any reason for Amy's affair is left ambiguous.
• Narm: Mort, scared of confronting himself to be the killer all along, starts yapping like a dog for seconds. Being Depp, this could be Narm Charm, of course. (This is something Depp took from his infant son whenever the child was confused and unable to articulate what was wrong.)
• Nightmare Fuel: The ending. Mort gets away with his crimes and it's implied he'll never get arrested. Also, the final shot where the camera goes under Mort's corn garden where it's implied Amy and Ted's corpses are buried (in a deleted scene the bodies are indeed shown.)
• Rooting for the Empire: Somewhat with Mort. Considering how unlikable everyone else is (especially Amy, who instigated the events of the plot), this is understandable. While the film plays off the implication of Alternative Character Interpretation, Mort at best comes off as a victim while Amy and Ted constantly badger him into divorcing her when Amy was the one who cheated on him in the first place.