In Vanilla Sky, Crowe shifts gears slightly in an attempt at a David Lynch/Alfred Hitchcock hybrid in this suspense love story where questions and puzzles are given left and right, delivered through the semiotic, the contextual and the metaphoric. For the most part, it works. Tom Cruise is David, a young magazine publisher who's had his father's business, and pretty much everything else in his life, dumped into his lap through virtue of wealth and good fortune. David is apparently enjoying a successful "fuck buddy" relationship with sexy Julie Gianni (played by a dangerous-looking Cameron Diaz), who congratulates him early in the film for boffing her four times in a row. David brushes this off modestly (with Cruise's patented all-teeth smile, no less), but even at this point we're thinking Kathi Bates in Misery and warning him to stay clear.

When David meets Sophia (Penélope Cruz) through his best friend Brian (Jason Lee), sparks begin to fly as the two not only hit it off, but Julie, who shows up to the party uninvited, starts giving the two of them a murderous once-over. In the morning, David leaves Sophia without having slept with her ("I'm a pleasure-delayer" he tells his psychiatrist) only to run into Julie who, after inviting him back to her place for coital absolution, gives him a tearful lecture about treating people responsibly and then crashes the car over a bridge. We soon learn that David survives, but is disfigured and crippled in one arm, and after being out of touch not only with Sophia but with his friends and his co-workers, his entire future is somewhat in jeopardy.

That's roughly the first half of the film, and while spinning out this love story, Crowe is also giving us hints of something darker in the midst of it all. David is apparently locked up, being evaluated by a psychiatrist (Kurt Russell) in order to determine whether an insanity plea is in order for David's murder of Sophia. Parts of the story up to this point are fairly reeking of Crowe's signature style: the subtle gushy platitudes and the cutesy romantic games (Sophia and David exchange caricatures of each other, only, while David's picture fairly satirizes Tom Cruise himself, Sophia's portrait is dark, lovely and mysterious). But Crowe is also using camera flashes of darker, more violent and disturbing images to give a back story and to foreshadow what we're going to learn about the crime David has committed, and why he's wearing his mask after apparently going through reconstructive plastic surgery.