The Eye

Dir: David Moreau / Xavier Palud
98 Mins
2008











Sydney is a young talented but blind violinist who is given a cornea transplant. As Sydney starts to see again she is confronted by a number of dusturbing visions which leads her first to question her sanity and then to subsequently team up with her Doctor / therapist and question where her new eyes came from.

The Eye is yet another remake of an Asian horror yarn, this time Jian Gui (2002). These remakes have never been distingushed, bettered in every department aside from budget by their originals. The Eye is no exception to this rule and taken even without reference to its superior original it is a confused and confusing film which jettisons the potential for honing an unsettling atmosphere to rely on cheap shock / jump tactics. There is no denying the effectiveness of early scenes when Sydney starts to view the world around her for the first time in a blur but the supposed big scares that follow feel tired and weak compared even to other Asian horror remakes such as The Grudge (2004). The Eye finally and completely fails when Sydney laboriously investigates the backstory of her doner to explain the phenomena she is undergoing. The discovery of convoluted backstories is something that sits uneasy and at the expense of the atmosphere in many of the original Asian horror films although it was often forgivable due to the nightmarish images they often portrayed. No such forgiveness is due to The Eye. Alot of this is simply down to bad writing, the back story can be as complicated as it need be but it should be presented to us with the simplicity to be accessible and not absurd on its own terms.

Bad writing is in truth only partly to blame for The Eye failing to engage. Jessica Alba turns in a performance so wooden you can almost see the strings being pulled. Alba has two believable forms of expression here, pouting and screaming. When the script calls for much more from her she delivers with the stoic emotion involved in reading from a teleprompter. This leads inevitably to some unintentionally comic moments, one which comes to mind has Alba cradling a body that is not there. Alba doesn't have many lines here, thankfully perhaps, but even the way in which she holds the phantom body seems stilted, wooden and fake. While Alassandro Nivola as Dr Paul Faulkner in the male lead is not as bad, he is hardly much better.

Horror as a genre is awash with remakes and rehashes. Part of audience satisfaction with horror is the familarity of the text, that satisfaction is only fulfilled though if the film grants us enough chills and disturbing moments. The Eye unfortunetly fails on both counts. The familarity of genre narrative is not subverted in any meaningful way but made complex and tangled for no good reason at all and it alienates the viewer. The disturbing moments the film has are very early on and give way to bad timing coinciding with unintentional comedy. For a film as po faced and serious as The Eye wants to be it is damning to consider that the only joy in this film might be laughs of the 'its so bad its almost good' variety.
2 / 6