Part of the problem with The Number 23 is director Joel Schumacher's interpretation of mood and atmosphere. For him, it's a glamorized thing that is only a few steps removed from the equally shiny normality of everyday life. So the problem with Schumacher's understanding of atmosphere is that he has none. He specializes in a form of polished, slick filmmaking that doesn't fit the darker material to which he is inexplicably drawn. Schumacher's style is too slick, his sense of the macabre too watered-down, and his concentration on the thematic implications of the story too distracted by more generalized ideas to really get at the dark heart of the material. What has saved some of his darker fare in the past is the strength of the sort of material with which he instinctively plays instead of explores, but with The Number 23, the script by Fernley Phillips does a decent job undermining its own intentions in a final act that explains the entire mystery away to its minutest detail. Then again, the bulk of the plot is only setup for the script's obligatory twist, so maybe Schumacher's directorial missteps aren't the movie's biggest problem.

Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) is an animal control officer, and it's his birthday today, February 3. He has a night planned out with his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen), who bakes cakes for a living. He starts out narrating the story of the events that will pass as the days go on, but the movie literally rewinds back to December 23 for some unknown reason to watch Walter shoot down the flirtations of another woman. Back in the day at hand, he is only minutes away from another monotonous day of sitting in his truck, waiting for calls that never come, when he gets an unwanted call about a dog on the loose. Still on the job, he responds, but the dog is a difficult catch, grabbing on to Walter's arm and giving him a good wound in the process. He follows the dog to the local cemetery, where it stands watching of the gravestone of one Laura Tollins. Done with the canine for now, he goes to pick up his wife, who has wandered into a book store next door to her work. She finds a book called The Number 23, and after paging through it while waiting, she buys it for her husband.

The book tells the story of an unnamed man who calls himself Fingerling, after a children's book he remembers from his childhood. Fingerling followed a dog into a neighbor's house and witnessed the aftermath of a woman's apparent suicide. Walter recognizes odd similarities in the narrative—the book was one his own childhood reads, there was a neighbor's dog, and his own mother committed suicide.