Don’t keep your popcorn on your lap during The Eye. It’ll wind up all over the floor.
As a rule, I’m annoyed by spring-loaded cats (when a director plants a false scare like the ubiquitous cat jumping from a closet, accompanied by a sudden spike in the soundtrack that would make anyone but a deaf person jump). Jump-scares seem to be more prevalent in this recent wave of “PG-13” horror, almost certainly because it’s a way to scare young audiences and send them into titters without introducing material that could jeopardize the rating. It’s a cheap tactic and forgotten by the next scene. It’s also a sign that the director doesn’t know how to generate real frisson and genuine terror.
All that said, there are numerous jump-scares throughout The Eye, a remake of a Hong Kong film by the Pang brothers, and many of them are quite effective (though not always as effective as in the 2002 original). More important, they are not false scares—no spring-loaded cats. They are delivered by ghosts that suddenly appear, and the ghosts have a reason in the story for being there.
The reason is a corneal transplant. Concert violinist Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) has been blind since a firecracker accident when she was five years old. Now she can see again, but her new eyes see dead people—and that’s not all. They also see demonic beings who are always inexplicably on hand to lead newly-departed spirits away to—who knows where, but I hope the deceased don’t have to spend their afterlife looking at those guys. The new eyes also impart other clairvoyant powers, as Sydney begins seeing both events that happened in the past and events that may happen in the future. Soon Sydney is on a quest to find out who the donor was, perhaps thereby finding the key to her creepy peepers. To give much more information than that would threaten spoilers.
One observation many critics have made about American remakes of foreign horror films is that, whereas Asian filmmakers are content to maintain an air of mystery, leaving supernatural events in the realm of the unexplained, American filmmakers feel a need to bring western logic to the events—a bone to the scientifically material worldview. Everything has a cause and follows laws that can be discovered and defined. Thus, in this version scriptwriter Sebastian Gutierrez (who also wrote Snakes on a Plane!) gives us some stuff about “cellular memory.” I have no problem with this: it is a logical place for Alba’s character to go in trying to explain what’s happening to her. She’s trying to convince her eye therapist (Alessandro Nivola) that she’s not crazy.
But introducing such scientific rationales into these movies is a two-edged sword: once you suggest answers and supply motives for events, the aspects that defy logic stand out in sharp contrast and raise all sorts of new questions. For instance, with her new corneas Sydney can now see ghosts, but she didn’t get ear transplants: why can she also hear them? And since newly-departed spirits are immediately escorted away by the creepy, anorexic shadow beings, what is the ghost of the boy in her apartment building doing still hanging around? Did he get overlooked? I wonder, because the guys with scary teeth seem very efficient—they even show up moments before a person is about to die, demonstrating a dedicated work ethic.
This is the second time in four weeks that we have French directors on an American remake of an Asian original. Is this the new Axis of Horror? I hope not, because the end results have ranged from uneven (The Eye) to downright hokey (One Missed Call).
The filmmakers follow the original pretty closely. They deliver a story that is interesting both in its exploration of the unreliability of our senses and its depiction of a woman struggling with horrific visions. The visions could either convince her she’s insane or, if they’re real, possibly drive her insane. Overall, we get acting that is passable but not noteworthy, an intriguing premise and fairly engaging storyline, and some scary scenes. One such chilling scene is the ghost in the elevator—it’s frightening here, but if you really want to be unnerved, see it in the original.
--Nicholas Ozment