The Friday Night Fright: The Eye
I’ve a lot of time for the Pang Brothers, their films are visually stylish but not at the expense of character and they’ve managed to avoid getting pigeonholed as horror directors. The Eye is probably their most well known film, and also the most successful, spawning two sequels, but I found it a little disappointing and not particularly original.
A cornea transplant patient starts seeing dead people and the mysterious shadow figures that come to take them away. Sound familiar? The Eye borrows a lot from The Sixth Sense and doesn’t do a very good job of hiding it.
The pace of the film is quite slow, not uncommon for Asian horror films, and adds to the feeling of mounting tension and there are some very creepy set pieces. Angelica Lee is excellent as Wong Kar Mun the woman who regains her sight after being blind since she was an infant but the love story angle of the film, that sees her doctor falling for her, doesn’t work and feels superfluous.
The film seems to lose its way at the end, with the reason behind the visions more tragic than terrifying, something the Pang’s must have realised as they seem to rush through this part of the film in order to get to the Hollywood style explosive climax, which put me in mind of The Mothman Prophecies, a film that was released a few months before The Eye. I can’t help wondering if this ending was a late addition, something the brothers came up with after seeing Mothman but regardless, it feels at odds the with quiet chills that are generated throughout the rest of the film.
For all its faults it’s well worth a look and I’ll be surprised if the American remake manages to improve on the original.
