Instead, they've gone the festival route. This works out well for us dusty Tucsonans, as it means we get a peek at it before everyone else on earth is finished talking about it.

Wicked is delightfully derivative: its style, lighting, subject and especially its penchant for cold, distant camera work are so Hitchcockian that it could have been directed by Brian DePalma. (The alternate joke here is "so like a Hitchcock film that Gus Van Sant is planning a shot-for-shot remake," but I'm tired of people kicking Gus Van Sant, dammit.)

Beginning with a scene ripped off from Psycho (a single woman in a tailored dress driving to ominous music), Wicked's plot begins in one of those expensive planned communities surrounded by a golf course and populated by people who have become so understimulated by green grass and no tides that they either turn into robots or swingers.

Ben Christianson and his wife Karen have both found alternate love partners to break up the monotony of their Danish modern décor, with Karen opting for trashy neighbor Lawson Smith, and Ben trashily opting for their Danish au pair. But neither Ben nor Karen have much personality, having ceded that function to their daughter Ellie, who makes Electra seem like one of King Lear's less savory daughters. While loving dad, Ellie hates Mommy so much that when Mommy is mysteriously murdered after (a) telling dad that she's leaving him, (b) telling her dangerous boyfriend that she's dumping him, and (c) forgetting to bring cookies to the neighborhood meeting, Ellie is still the most likely suspect.

But it wouldn't be a Hitchcockian mystery without the other possibilities, and in an archly comic role as the police investigator, Michael Parks (making his 62nd film appearance, but only his seventh turn as a police officer) makes neighbor Lawson Smith his top suspect. When asked "Do you think it was him?" by a junior officer, Parks deadpans, "Him...or somebody else."

In spite of Parks' fun and campy performance, the film really belongs to Stiles, who plays the Hitchcock femme fatale to a tee. After Mommy dies, teenager Ellie starts to wear her dresses and make-up, cooks for dad, fusses over him, and sleeps beside him. Sleeping turns to other pursuits as Ellie follows her dream of having daddy to herself, and littler sister Inger, though only 10, starts to grow a bit suspicious, in more ways than one.

Still, to give away too much would ruin the fun, so it's best to note that there are a dozen more plot twists waiting, and that Wicked, while perhaps too professional and slick for the festival circuit, might just be the highlight of this year's Arizona International.