This is a film about photo fetishism, a subject that's obviously fraught with meaning for writer/director Mark Romanek's heart. Romanek, who directed such bizarro music videos as "Closer" for Nine Inch Nails and "Scream" for Michael and Janet Jackson, has an undeniably intense and felicitous visual style - in this film he could be channeling Kubrick, especially in the scenes depicting the mechanics of photo processing. In fact, the store where Sy works could be a Kubrick set, especially when Romanek strips the aisles bare of product (and gives Sy hands-down the worst case of red-eye in film history). Moreover, the underlying themes-the film eventually conflates voyeurism, consumerism and isolation-are utterly Kubrickian.

So it's fitting that One Hour Photo has a great photographic sensibility (partly courtesy D.P. Jeff Cronenweth, who shot Fight Club) and a near-mystical appreciation of the snapshot. "No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget," Sy observes, noting that the photos he develops yield a distorted view of other people's lives. In one particularly apt sequence, Sy flips through a roll of photos that explore the way a child might see the world. In another, an apartment wall covered with photographic images offers a vivid window on an obsessive psyche. Romanek even manages, in a perfunctory way, to touch on the prurient appeal of pornography, in which people who pretend to love each other pretend to be doing loving things to one another in an alien environment.

Thing is, Romanek's music video for Fiona Apple's "Criminal," in which the twig-thin singer writhes around in a variety of skimpy undergarments on a bargain-basement set that resembles the environs of amateur porn, circa 1975, is superior to this feature in just about every way. It's sexier, it's creepier, and it has more to say about the pleasures and perils of photographing and being photographed. It's more immediate, where One Hour Photo seems to have been composed at a careful, perfect distance.

Romanek's main problem may have been the decision to direct his own screenplay rather than looking for top-drawer work from a third party that might have married fruitfully with his sensibility. Despite the fascinating visuals and the director's investment in the material, the story is pretty thin. Where Romanek excels is in creating a mood - at its best, One Hour Photo is a sterling evocation of loneliness.