The Eye is a 2008 horror film about a woman who receives an eye transplant that allows her to see into the supernatural world.
The joy of any real fantasy film, being something akin to elves, dragons, and rings of ultimate power to something set more in reality that transports us or something else into a level of unreality is how convincing it all starts. We as an audience are ready and willing to suspend disbelief, looking forward to being transported to worlds unseen before, but it all can fall flat right where it begins if we don’t have any faith in the characters or setting.
That’s where we find ourselves right away in David Moreau and Xavier Palud‘s remake of the superior (yet flawed) horror film The Eye (見鬼) from the Pang Brothers. This update is a mostly lackluster and unimaginative take that has some skimpy scares but is miscast and stripped of any authenticity, leaving it a curious misstep that might prove entertaining for some taken by cheap chills and limited suspense.
Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) is a concert violinist, young and attractive, successful and ambitious. She’s also blind, having lost her sight at five-years-old in an accident. Her sister is Helen (Parker Posey), the two close, and by her side when Sidney has a cornea transplant. The surgery is a success, initially giving her partial, albeit blurry sight, though she starts to suffer from visions and horrific nightmares of fire and death. Hoping to find out why – as her eyesight clears – she joins vision therapist (and violinist) Paul (Alessandro Nivola) in learning how to navigate with her eyes and then why she’s having such traumatic experiences.
Up to this point, the movie has established a rather rudimentary tone, playing somewhat lazily into typical jumpscares and spooky music that does little in creating any real tension. The filmmakers have a limited agenda and are staging everything to that point, keeping Sydney a shallow characters we care nearly nothing about. By the time she begins having full blown visions of dead people, it slips right off the rails, even if the idea is compelling (if not widely overused).
Sydney and Paul eventually head to Mexico to the village of the woman (Fernanda Romero) who donated the eyes. Without giving away spoilers, she has her own harrowing history and it’s here where Sidney thinks her new sight has a purpose, to warn people of coming death by accidents. While that has some promise, and might have been explored better, it’s still disappointing creatively, with hardly any challenge behind the whole thing, the film mostly just a collection of paper thin frights that don’t do much but conjure some unintended smirks.
That’s not to say there isn’t anything worthy. The best moment comes late in the first half when Sydney is out on the streets at night, just awoke from a terrifying nightmare. She literally runs into a young blonde woman who passes right through her. They both stop and look at each other, jarred by what that means, as Sydney then spots a car accident and the body of the woman she just saw now lying dead in the pavement. What happens next is actually pretty chiling and even clever for what it could have meant, but instead loses traction in the next scene.
Alba has had a long and frustratingly empty film career, her good looks key to her success but rarely given any chance to make good on her acting skills. This might have been a chance to take her more seriously, the role of a blind woman loaded with potential, though that’s only a superficial crutch in getting the movie to its end. She simply doesn’t have the emotional presence to sustain the investment needed to make us care, which admittedly, it partially due to the lifeless script. There’s not much nuance to the story, moving fast and with steady purpose to obvious horror landmarks.
The Eye did fairly well at the box office, audiences craving this sort of supernatural horror story, and surely, it scratches a minor itch in satisfying the basic needs of such. However, it’s all too generic to matter, rarely finding its footing on an already slippery slope. No doubt, this will come around again someday, someone thinking it still has legs (er, eyes?). Hopefully, they will find something more interesting to say about it.