(2002) What makes up the true picture of people's lives, director and author of the original screenplay Mark Romanek asks in this chilling motion picture. Not the snapshots they take of themselves and have processed at a photo-finishing center, such as the mini-lab in a SavMart where Seymour Parrish (Robin Williams) has worked for eleven years.

With over 20 years of film-developing experience, Sy tells us (or the police detective during interrogation) of the skill and pride he devotes to his job: "I process these photos as if they were my own." Some of them he treats as his own, making copies of hundreds of photos over the years that Nina Yorkin (Connie Nielsen) has brought in of her family, which includes her husband Will (Michael Vartan) and their nine-year-old son Jake (Dylan Smith), affixing them to a wall in his living room.

He imagines himself as Uncle Sy, sharing the pictures with a waitress and fantasizing about entering their home. Lacking friends (though he gets along well with his assistant Yoshi) and family, Sy leads a lonely life, which young Jake senses, telling his mother he feels sorry for Si the photo guy. Jake also knows his parents aren't the happiest couple in the world either, hearing them argue over money and his mother retaliate: "You're an emotionally neglectful husband … and father."

Sy shows up at Jake's soccer practice and tries to make a gift of a toy; he encounters Nina at a Dairy Queen, where she remarks on his reading Deepak Chopak's The Path to Love (which he'd earlier seen her carrying when turning in more photos), leading to a brief colloquy on coincidence and Sy's quoting from the book: "The things we fear the most have already happened."

Customers bring in their film of pictures taken of cats, babies, auto wrecks, plastic surgery, amateur nudes (only instances involving children must be reported); their photography announces: "I was here"; "I existed"; "I was happy." SavMart's manager Bill (Gary Cole) confronts Sy with his having made a scene with a tech repairman, taking half an hour extra for lunch breaks, giving away merchandise to certain customers, and not being able to account for hundreds of missing prints; on the spot Sy gets sacked, though he's given the rest of the week to finish up.

Unaware of what's happened, Nina and Jake come in with Jake's birthday camera (Sy's gift) to have the film developed; having earlier recognized the features of an infrequent customer, Maya Burson's face from an older photo of Will's softball team, Sy inspects her pictures and exchanges them with those he's processed for Jake. As he departs the store, he steals a hunting knife.

After waiting in the parking lot the next day for Nina and Jake to pick up the photos, he follows them in his car to their home where he spies on the family through his camera's telephoto lens, crying in frustration when he witnesses no reaction to a betrayal of family trust: "What the hell's wrong with these people?"

Sy explains that according to the Oxford English Dictionary the first recorded instance in 1808 of "snapshot" was in the context of hunting. Bill, who had confronted Sy earlier, telling him he could not use SavMart for processing his photos, calls the police after Yoshi brings him the packet of photos Sy had delivered to be developed: all shots of Bill's little daughter.

"No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget," Sy assures us.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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