THE EYE, released without a press screening, is a tidy enough little supernatural thriller. A soupcon light on the thrills part it may be, but it makes up for it with a nicely rendered eeriness that pays appropriate homage to the Pang Brothers flick of the same name on which it is based. One can also nitpick about Jessica Alba being a little light when playing the desperation of a blind woman whose restored vision is more than anyone bargained for, but she’s credible enough within the framework of a strong script and atmospheric direction to sweep her along. It all begs the question about why the studio wanted to keep this one under wraps.
Alba is Sidney Wells, sweet as a sugar dumpling, twice as cute, and a concert violinist with a big future ahead of her. Blind since the age of five from an accident for which her sister, Helen (Parker Posey) has been feeling guilty over for 15 years, she’s about to have a cornea transplant that will restore her sight. What she doesn’t know is that the donor is not so ready to let them go, and so when Sidney starts seeing odd things everyone, including Sidney, ascribes it to the confusion of having to re-learn the world with visual cues. At first anyway. Those blurry shadows that Sidney sees don’t go away as she becomes more accustomed to her new-found visual sense. In fact, they become more distinct, and more peevish. She’s also seeing people dead people, a line that the script has the good grace to acknowledge as a tag line from another film, and to make sport of. Of course, no one believes Sidney, they think she’s cracking up with the new visual overload. Of course Sidney becomes more and more convinced that she isn’t cracking up, at least not for that reason. The film as a whole is Sidney convincing her visual orientation doctor, Paul (Alessandro Nivola) that she is really seeing what she’s seeing, and then solving the mystery of why her donor won’t rest in peace.
This, with variations, is a tried-and-true plot device, but juxtaposing Sidney’s disorientation with her new vision and the things for which normally sighted people have no frame of reference is a nice twist. It’s all done with a lurking subtlety, relying more on the strangeness of Sidney’s new situation as a whole rather than the typical jump-and-scare techniques lesser ghost stories fall back on. There’s also the nice, but understated, use of Sidney’s point of view, leaving the audience to also wonder from time to time who is real and who isn’t. From the original is the terrific effect of having Sidney’s room slowly rearrange itself into a strange place she’s never seen, a place that in and of itself is ordinary enough, but terrifying because of its being so very out of place. Demerits, though, for the cliché of the brave little tumor girl Sidney meets in the hospital, who is chipper despite her life-threatening illness, and a doctor, otherwise nicely played with a prickly edge by Nivola, who suddenly believes Sidney after she makes a snarky comment to him.
THE EYE has a steady pace rather than a heart-racing one, which suits the tone and mood perfectly. The surprises that spring are rarely trite, and the solution to Sidney’s problem is, within the confines of the internal logic of this fever dream, perfectly sensible. Not spectacular, not a waste, it’s clever enough to keep its momentum going, and smart enough to not overreach its mission of being a diverting 90 minutes or so. Now, if only the filmmakers would drop or rewrite the irritating final narration, which restates what the audience has just seen as though it were an astounding revelation.
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