THE EYE
Starring Jessica Alba, Parker Posey. Written by
Sebastian Guiterrez. Directed by David Moreau, Xavier Palud. (PG) 91
min. Opened Feb 1.
The 2002 Hong Kong horror flick The Eye took a conceit borrowed from 1976’s Pauline-Kael-approved shocker The Eyes of Laura Mars — what if you were to be plagued by someone else’s visions? — and put it through the post-Ring ringer. The American remake borrows the borrowed conceit and does precious little with it. That The Eye Version 2.0 is not appreciably worse than its predecessor speaks to the mediocrity of the source material.
To give credit where it’s due, Jessica Alba is surprisingly affecting as Sydney Miles, a blind violinist who rediscovers her sight after a cornea transplant. Alba is so believable as a woman thrown out of her comfort zone ( and the visuals, which approximate her blurred POV, play so surprisingly well as a kind of genre equivalent of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) that it’s actually a disappointment when the plot kicks in. About that plot: Sydney starts seeing dead people (mundane, confused specters pilfered from The Sixth Sense) and wonders a) whose eyes she’s seeing them through and b) what she can do about it. The rhythm is deadening: Sydney, left alone in her apartment, sees something freaky; we cut to the daytime where she’s surrounded by doubting Thomases; cut back to nighttime and cue the freaky.
There are some arresting images; the fuzzy phantoms Sydney spies accosting the recently deceased have a feral quality (and, to once again invoke M. Night Shyamalan, vaguely resemble the home-invading alien from Signs), and there’s a clever, blink-quick visual allusion to The Exorcist. The Eye is good-looking (like the original) and not offensively dumb (like 80 per cent of the Asian horror remakes crowding screens over the last half-decade) but a lack of of crappiness doesn’t equal real quality.