Johnny Depp is superb! He portray's his character, a somewhat eccentric, isolated writer, in his typically quirky manner. I enjoyed watching the movie just to see what he'd say or do next. I got the impression he was ad-libbing his monologues and it brought a smile to my face. The movie itself did little for me, however. It was pretty straight-forward through most of it, nothing terrific, nothing unexpected. Man shows up at door claiming Mort (Depp's character) plagiarized him. The man turns out to be a psycho, or so we think. By the way, why does the family pet always get killed? I mean, ALWAYS! In this one, it's the dog. Things get a little more interesting when Mort starts thinking that maybe his estranged wife's new boyfriend might be behind everything, that he might have sent this psycho after Mort in the hopes of speeding up the divorce but things have gotten out of control. Mort even confronts the boyfriend about it. Their conversation does not fit into the twist near the end of the movie, however. In fact, nothing fits in to the twist. It turns out that this psycho doesn't exist, it's Mort himself that has been doing everything to himself. He's mad. He killed his own dog. He killed his own neighbor, though he thought the stalker had killed him because he had seen the two of them together. Turns out the neighbor only saw Mort arguing with himself. Mort killed the detective he hired to intimidate the stalker. Okay, the twist was a good idea but it happened so abruptly that you were tempted to hit rewind to see if you missed something. And it really contradicted the conversation Mort had with the boyfriend who had admitted that things were out of his control. Or, who knows, maybe that conversation never took place either. Maybe Mort was standing at the gas station talking to himself. Okay, an interesting movie with an interesting twist if the twist had been integrated better, if clues had been given that you could later say, oh I should have seen that coming, I should have caught that. But there was no indication and so it seemed fabricated. I don't think the move will hurt Depp's reputation, however. He did a terrific acting job and, okay, I'm tempted to play a couple of parts again just to hear his quirky little jibes at himself and his wife and the boyfriend.. Glad I sat through it but I've seen better.