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The Eye
**
Cinema Releases - November 8, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. Hong
Kong/UK. 99 minutes. Directed by Danny Pang, Oxide Pang. Written by Jo Jo
Huet-chun Hui, Danny Pang, Oxide Pang. Starring Lee Sin-je, Lawrence Chou,
Chutcha Rujinanon, Yut Lai So, Candy Lo, Yin Ping Ko, Pierre Png, Edmund
Chen.
Sometimes you gotta admire filmmakers' spirits
even in their hours of failure. "The Eye" begins with a
surprisingly convincing optical effect whereby the film looks like it's burning
in the projector. After a prolonged white light, the sound effects come blasting
on, and a large red title card appears with the words "Sit
tight!"
Cool, but maybe not wise, and probably a bit too
cocky. The directors, Danny and Oxide Pang, are informing us they're so confident
in the scares of their movie that they can wink at us and still get away
with it. We're challenged not to be terrified. And after a confrontation
like that, isn't it natural that we meet the test, get our defences up and
assume some sort of battle with the screen? It's as if we know the film is
not going to terrify us as much as it thinks, and we're waiting to be proved
wrong.
We never are proved wrong, because the film is
simply not very good.
It's about Mun (Lee Sin-je), a blind young woman
from Hong Kong who at the beginning of the story gets a cornea transplant
to fully restore her sight. This is a slow process; at first all Mun can
see is too much light and a whole lot of blurring -- and even when images
become sharper, there are strange, horrifying visions, like the kid from
down the hall eating candles and repetitively looking for his report card...
even though he's supposed to be dead.
Some horror movies go out of their way to be merciless
collections of scare tactics -- think "Halloween". Others manage to tell
good stories while giving us the shivers. Then there are those pictures that
ponderously pretend to be telling stories and building up atmosphere,
occasionally stopping for moments of shock.
"The Eye" falls into the third category. We get
a nonsensical voice-over about the dual beauty and ugliness that can be viewed
in the world, a collection of peaceful scenes about Mun getting used to her
vision, a relationship between her and a school-age cancer patient in the
next hospital bed, and a very slow, largely unspoken romance between Mun
and her nervous young doctor. None of this stuff is original, or has any
conviction, and so the movie is not engaging our emotions but simply biding
time. I won't even get to wondering how Mun's new eyes somehow enable her
to not only see dead people, but hear them too.
Of the creepy things that happen, many are skilfully
staged. One tremendously snappy and unnerving scene sees an apparition appear
before Mun while she takes her first calligraphy lesson; it looms in front
of her desk before suddenly screaming, lunging and vanishing into air. There
are also various rumblings, musical echoes, unclear visions and ambient cutaways,
but they're lacking in power, firstly because they seem too orchestrated,
secondly because they do not emerge from the atmosphere of the quiet scenes.
Rather than taking the story into disturbing realms, the scary stuff seems
to exist aside from it.
Anyway, I'm already pretty apprehensive about
stories dealing with haunted body parts. Instead of being reminded of classic
horror novels or even "Forbidden Planet", I get to thinking about that crappy
Michael Caine movie "The Hand", where a disembodied appendage started killing
off the hero's enemies before chasing him around his desk like that thing
from "The Addams Family". "The Eye" plays like "The Hand" clumsily mishmashed
with "At First Sight", "The Sixth Sense", "Ring" and "The Mothman Prophecies",
and it just goes on and on.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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