By conservative estimates, horror maestro Stephen King writes approximately one book an hour and many of them seem to involve splitting things in half. As a theme, dualism runs through King's entire body of work, from the apocalyptic dust-up in “The Stand” to the evil twin at large in “The Dark Half.”

‘‘Secret Window,’’ based on a King novella from the book ‘‘Two Past Midnight,’’ is more of the same, a psychological thriller about Jungian mental schisms and marital dissolution involving a reclusive writer (In a King story? Believe it!) plagued by a dark and eerily inhuman protagonist. Only the most virginal and unintuitive audiences will have trouble negotiating the pro forma plot “twists” and heavily graded turns that writer-director David Koepp (“Stir of Echoes”) erects on ...

Whoa. Hold on, there, fella.

What?! Who’s there?

It’s me, your literary “dark”self. One too many formulaic Ashley Judd empowerment fantasies has given voice to the gnawing dissatisfaction inside of you, the self that secretly resents skewering movies for being too predictable. After all, if you see enough movies, aren't almost all of them predictable?

I guess.

What about the good things in “Secret Window?” For instance, Johnny Depp’s performance as Mort Rainey, a successful and stylishly disheveled writer (with his grown-out dye-job, he sort of looks like our eighth-grade English teacher) who is cuckolded by his wife (Maria Bello from ‘‘The Cooler”) and spends the next six months holed up in his upstate New York cabin, snoozing on the couch, living on Doritos, trying unsuccessfully to surmount a towering case of writer's block.

Mort isn't the most well-balanced character around — at times he's written as tough and detached, at others, wimpy and skittish — but Depp (“The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl”) makes the character his own, inventing a hilariously affected vocabulary of paranoid tics and rhythms and infusing humor into a role that probably laid flat on the page.

Yes, OK, Depp is God. Congress makes it official next month. But what about the scene where Mort is visited by John Shooter (John Turturro), a slow-
talkin’ Mississippi rube who flatly accuses him of plagiarizing one of his stories, about (forebodingly enough) a writer who murders his wife and buries her under a small window next to their cabin?

From the moment we see him, isn’t it just a little too obvious that Shooter isn’t quite of this world? Doesn’t it tip the first domino in a chain-reaction of obviousness that extends all the way to the final scene? I would cite the movies that this movie evokes, but then it would be obvious to our readers, too, and you know hate mail hurts our feelings.
It doesn’t really bug me, frankly. Moreover, I sort of liked the tit-for-tat game that Mort plays with the increasingly violent and agitated Shooter. Mort promises to show Shooter a back copy of a literary magazine that will prove his innocence, but some inconvenience or other always prevents him from laying his hands on it.

Right! That didn’t strike you as a dead giveaway?

Watch it ...

Whoops. Sorry.

At one point, Mort talks to his private investigator (Charles Dutton) about committing plagiarism in the past, and it seems to be one of those gateway decision things: Once you do it, you can never be sure that anything you write is totally above reproach. Look, I'm not saying ‘‘Secret Window’’ is a perfect movie, but there are some engaging themes here about self-bargaining that are, at least, edifying to mull over.

Fair enough, but how annoying was it for Timothy Hutton, who played the conflicted writer in “The Dark Half,” to materialize here as Depp’s romantic rival? Maybe it was stunt casting, maybe not; whatever the rationale, it irked me something fierce.

No argument here, pal.