The Big Whatsit

Confession time - I haven’t seen Gin gwai, the original version of The Eye, the Hong Kong horror classic that continued the tradition of the Far East being the place for fright flicks. It was the same with The Grudge; the first I knew of Takazi Shimizu’s endless cycle of strangely similar shockers was the Sarah Michelle Gellar update. Critically it was reviled; personally, I have never been so terrified by a simple piece of celluloid.

Perhaps I was hoping for more of the same with the American remake of The Eye. Its publicity, which promises a ‘Grudge-like’ experience was promising, and let’s face it watching Jessica Alba for 90 minutes isn’t the worst hardship one might come across. Of course it turned out to be clueless bobbins. For some reason, English language versions of Eastern horror films seem to believe that such elements as atmosphere are totally unnecessary, and as anyone who has seen Ringu or Dark Water knows (I at least caught the Japanese versions of these movies first) take that away and there’s next to nothing left.

What we get instead is CGI, and lots of it. ‘Throw money at the screen!’ the producers cry, forgetting conveniently that the 1999 remake of 1960s classic, The Haunting, fell on its expensive backside precisely because it showed us exactly the images we should have painted in our minds. Even the most gifted special effects experts appreciate that there is absolutely nothing they can conjure to match the power of the human imagination. That’s why a slow-burning, spooky atmosphere makes for great horror, and millions of dollars’ worth of computer generated animation looks like a dog’s dinner.

Then there’s the plot, which doesn’t end up making any sense. Things start well enough. Alba is Sydney, a young woman who’s been blind since a childhood accident robbed her of her sight. Having long since adjusted to her lot, Sydney has a life and is an accomplished concert violinist. It’s only at the insistence of her sister that she decides to undergo vision-restoring surgery, a process that involves using the corneas of a deceased donor. Following the operation, Sydney’s world is a blur initially, and though she sees things that shouldn’t be there, we get the sense that this might be a result of her eyes adjusting.

It isn’t, and what Sydney sees is dead people. Not only dead people, but the demons that guide them to the afterlife also. Back at her flat, she comes across a small child, who asks her if she has seen his report card. The kid’s dead, murdered by his father, meaning that Sydney witnesses ghosts from the distant past along with those who have only just demised. Alongside this are the disturbing dreams from someone else’s evidently tragic life, and the moments where a room from somewhere else melts into her own bedroom’s surroundings. Later still, Sydney finds that she can even see death before it strikes, and if that’s the case then she might also prevent it.

Confused? I know I was, and ultimately it seemed that there was very little logic to The Eye. If it was frightening, it went in, and that was about the extent of its rules. The ‘I see dead people’ shtick has been done elsewhere, and much better than this. A rehash of The Sixth Sense might not have been so bad, but then the movie changes tack entirely, suddenly reminding me of Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder with its scary things that might just be okay once you get to understand them a little better. More than anything, though, its template is the aforementioned Grudge. Its aim is to strike fear into us, and everything is sacrificed to the God that is shock tactics. Forget things like narrative and atmosphere. All elements are subservient to the effort to slap as many scares on the screen as possible, and though you may have it that ultimately this is what horror is all about, the loser is the whole. Without any real structure or meaning, The Eye fails to possess any real worth. The first viewing might be a bit like a roller coaster ride. It’s fun. But when it comes to the second time, you know what’s coming, and the sudden lack of edge exposes its shallowness.

In the thick of it all is Alba, who does her best with the material. She isn’t helped by a terrible, nonsensical script, and the the dubbing of music over her violin playing - clearly all those lessons were for naught, Jessica - looks out of joint and frankly amateurish. A lack of confidence in the leading lady, perhaps, but Alba is some distance from being the worst thing on show here. Support is offered by Alessandro Nivola, playing an eye specialist who is naturally sceptical of Sydney’s supernatural peepers, until he, er, suddenly isn’t anymore. Neither sinks entirely under the weight of the bad material. Alba might be dismissed as a cutie, as too lightweight when it comes to taking the lead, but the more likely truth is that it’s simply a poor movie. She really isn’t bad, and neither are the jump cutting and sound work, which try to build some semblance of atmosphere. They need to, because it’s a quality that seems to have been omitted when it came to writing the screenplay.