See nicely paced horror through 'The Eye' of the beholder
Drenched in dread and chilly blue-gray light, the Thai/Hong Kong horror film "The Eye" is quite effective at scaring the daylights out of an audience. At its center is a wispy young woman named Mun (Lee Sin-Je), blind since infancy, who undergoes a corneal transplant to restore her sight. Vision returns, blurry at first — but who's that strange man in black, who disappears as she reaches for him? Or the woman with bruised eyes and a purple tongue, who likewise isn't quite there?
Call in the "Sixth Sense" squad: Mun's seeing dead people, or, to be precise, harbingers of dead people. With the help of a handsome young therapist (Lawrence Chou, who does a nice job with the inevitable line "She's more than a patient to me"), she becomes increasingly desperate to understand at what price she has bought sight — and from whom?
Though the film at times seems to be a psychological thriller with a B-movie trapped inside screaming to get out (it does finally burst through in the overwrought final few minutes), "The Eye" finds nicely paced horror in the old idea of seeing the world through another's eyes. And the Pang Brothers (Oxide and Danny, a writing/directing team) use their cameras inventively, letting us experience Mun's vision as it blurs in and out.
Particularly in its first two-thirds, "The Eye" takes its time to build the story from details; small weirdnesses are allowed to pop up in Mun's life, and one particular sequence on an elevator has an almost desperate slowness to it (in a very good, hairs-standing-up-on-the-back-of-the-neck way).
Word is that Hollywood has already found this film — even before it played a single American theater, Tom Cruise's production company had acquired the remake rights. Let's hope the movie's elegant pace survives translation, as well as that black-clad specter. The Pangs never quite show him to us, except in a blur — knowing that real fear is in our mind's eye.
Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com
|