Movies: The Eye

The Eye's opening premise is essentially the same as Blink: Mun (Angelica Lee) receives a cornea transplant after spending most of her life blind, and finds that her newfound sight seems to be playing tricks on her. Sometimes she wakes up in an unfamiliar room; sometimes she sees people who don't seem to be there. Sometimes the reflection in the mirror is different. At first she chalks this up to the period of adjustment involved with her new vision — she can't recognize most objects on sight yet — but slowly she realizes something else may be going on.

Mun is, as you may have guessed simply from my prior hints, seeing the dead. One of the ways Mun fits the pieces together is when she encounters a young boy looking for a lost report card outside her apartment. He's dead, as she soon finds out; his parents are still grieving over him having killed himself by leaping out of a window not long ago. Other ghosts swim into view. Mun, however, wants nothing to do with them; she is terrified of her newfound power, and simply wants to be rid of it. Her doctor (Lawrence Chou) at first doesn't believe her, but soon the evidence piles up and up until there's no other possible answer.

There is a great deal more, of course, and I'm loathe to ruin it even if you have read this far. Sure, the plotting is hokey and somewhat obvious, but the one thing the movie does amazingly well is keep you stuck in your seat during its running time. There are two moments in particular that stand out: the first is a scene of sheer heart-in-mouth terror in an elevator, and the other is the film's climax — although, unfortunately, that climax may be the part that has people pointing and shouting "Sixth Sense rip-off!", as it takes place in a traffic jam and has a vaguely similar mechanic. The Pangs manage to find a wholly new direction for the scene, though, and give it an apocalyptic grandeur that is undeniably thrilling. (Apparently the brothers based this scene on an anecdote they read in the news.)

The Eye is shot using a technique that was used to some degree in Bangkok Dangerous, but here it is applied more rigorously. The Pangs use a lens with a very short depth-of-field, and often put Mun in a scene where she is the only object in focus. Everything else is hazy, distant. It serves an intriguing dual purpose: it isolates her further from everyone else, and it also provides us with a sense of what her world must feel like without a POV shot (although we get plenty of those anyway). There's also much of the same fractured editing, used here to bring past and present together when needed, and some judicious use of CGI as well — although a couple of the ghost shots are disappointingly fake-looking. The best moment is a simple black-and-white flashback, overexposed and grainy, that depicts a moment from the past with terrible repercussions for the future.

There are two things that frustrate me the most about The Eye. Barring its Asian atmosphere and sensibilities (there's a good deal of foofaraw about what the dead need to rest in peace, etc.), it's been cobbled together all too obviously from other films, and not always good ones. The reason movies like The Ring are so refreshing is because they are both original and culturally informed; The Eye can't help but feel like a retread, however gorgeously realized it is.

The other is something more personal. It's immensely frustrating to me to see the Pangs put such evident care and craft into this movie, to infuse it with such a sense of real grandeur and dread, but to use a story that doesn't really support such talent. This is still an entertaining and well-made movie, don't get me wrong. Just that I can't help but feel if they ever put their evident talents into a movie that is as ambitious in the story department as it is in its look and feel, they will really have something. I felt that way about them with Bangkok Dangerous; with The Eye, it now goes double.