Almost laughable in its straight-faced, antiseptically designed seriousness, the talented music video director Mark Romanek's big-screen debut aspires to be a suburban-anomie retelling of a classic voyeur thriller like Peeping Tom, Psycho, or Taxi Driver. Unfortunately, it's closer to the yuppies-in-danger subgenre of the 1980s (Pacific Heights, Hand That Rocks the Cradle, et al.), but with new-age apologias standing in for those films' pulpy shocks and bloody horror. Romanek earns points for his meticulous mise-en-scène: the well-meaning menace "Sy the Photo Guy" (Robin Williams) works in a pristine cathedral of consumer goods called SavMart (an ostensible swipe at WalMart), and the tortured (and torturous) young marrieds played by Connie Nielsen and Michael Vartan live in a Frank Lloyd Wright-styled home that would make the editors of Architectural Digest blush. But the director's attention to detail actually works against his script's supposition that there's something rotten at the core of this affluent alternate universe. With its clean aisles and sans-serif elegance, SavMart looks more like a socialist wundermall than an indictment of capitalist dehumanization, and Nielsen and Vartan's neverending parade of runway-ready coiffures seem tailor-made to their Deepak Chopra-inspired homilies (which, by the way, are treated with reverence). Add that to Williams' distinctly non-threatening hangdog demeanor -- culminating in a so-what anticlimax followed by a pat explanation for his relative "madness" -- and what's left is a patchwork art-student thesis film with little to say about alienation, consumerism, or family dysfunction.