FOR too long the three words "Robin Williams in..." have been nothing but a hazard warning light. One minute, let alone one hour, had become too much. However, here comes Robin Williams in...good thriller shock.

This summer he had served notice of his intention to quit Nice Guy Avenue, cutting the schmaltz, the irritatingly madcap movements and the unfunny funny business to play an elusive killer in Insomnia.

He is still to answer fully for the crimes of Patch Adams, Bicentennial Man and Toys, but he has at last gone back to one of his strengths: playing characters on the edge, be it the DJ in Good Morning , Vietnam, the teacher in Dead Poets Society or that hairy chap in The Fisher King.

In his new nasty turn, Williams is loner Sy Parrish, the meticulous photo-printing guy, a fixture yet anonymous figure at the local budget store. Neat of hair, grey of shoe and life, outwardly mild of manner, he has no happy moments of his own to photograph. Instead, he has wallpapered his ascetic apartment in illicit extra prints of his "adopted" picture-perfect family, the Yorkins, at their jolliest times.

Prurient psycho Sy has charted husband Will (Michael Vartan), wife Nina (Connie Nielsen) and their son Jake (Dylan Smith) from the boy's birth to his ninth birthday, and now, as he tells Nina when he follows her to a mall caf, he thinks of himself as Uncle Sy.

When he finds photographic evidence that business boss Will is getting down to the other kind of business with an office girl, Uncle Sy feels the need to correct the imperfections in the Yorkin house. He decides to take matters and a knife into his own hand, particularly with time to kill after being fired from his job for keeping incorrect print records.

If Williams has re-discovered a magnetism ironically through minimalism, then part of the credit for his resurrection must go Mark Romanek, a pop promo wizard who graduates to movie writer-director status with One Hour Photo. His draining of colour from the bleached Williams and the anodyne super-mart aisles is particularly effectively, but his decision to use Sy as narrator is less successful. It may add a tragic dimension to this oddball but the one-eye view leaves other characters, in particular Eriq La Salle's slothful detective, as flat as a photograph.

However, Williams the fallen star is on the rise anew. Now keep him away from happy-pill comedy.

Updated: 08:40 Friday, October 04, 2002