The Eye

There has been a recent upturn in the production of intelligent horror films, those which don't need to (but can) show the awfulness of a situation, but which also rely on the audience to figure things out for themselves. The successes of such films as The Sixth Sense (1999) and the pant-wettingly scary The Ring (1998) has led to a slew of similarly themed products. On the surface, The Eye seems to fit the bill perfectly - spooky green tinged poster and a plot premise that involves seeing dead people. However The Eye offers a whole new, slick horror experience amidst the substantial post-modern plunderings, possessing all the trimmings of a contemporary horror film but without trespassing into self-parody.

Mun has been blind for most of her life but undergoes a successful cornea transplant operation. However not only does she have to learn to live with the gift of sight, she appears to have developed another gift - a second sight - which enables her to see the dead and dying. Restless ghosts haunt her days - a young boy who committed suicide, patients in the hospital - until the living and the dead are all but indistinguishable. So in the tradition of the best transplant films, she sets off to Thailand with her therapist, to find the donor's origins and end the nightmare. Or can she?

The Eye has a slow-moving, almost ethereal tone and the plot unfolds very deliberately. The Pang brothers manage to juggle the spooky and underplayed elements of the story with energetic and occasionally (deliberately) disorientating camerawork but without causing a conflict of interests. Although the film is stylised to excess, they nevertheless don't lose sight (so to speak) of the story or the focus on the central character. The camera's subjective viewpoint often allows us to identify with Mum's predicament as we "learn to see" with her. Thus shapes may be depicted in blurred and distorted vision, people identified by their relative height, and focusing, or lack of it, occurs in multiple planes. Many horror films rely upon the "monster" of the piece being out of sight, the theory being that the viewer's imagination can provide far more scares than most horror pictures can possibly depict. In this instance, most of the ghosts appear from the shadows, or out of focus only occasionally becoming clear and then in extreme close-up. This, of course, makes the death figure who leads away the souls to an afterlife all the scarier. Crucially the quality of the visuals in the quiet scenes are matched with the ambition of the film's engrossing, and occasionally effects-heavy, set pieces. Pitched alongside this is exemplary use of sound that evokes creepiness frequently and opens in loud bursts whenever another jump is required. Throughout there is a sense of yin and yang in the brothers' film-making; quiet and loud, subtle then showy, insular then spectacular. At the risk of revealing too much there are two major twists that work in parallel to this way of thinking - one insular, personal and centred on the main protagonist and the other large, set-piece based sfx film-making. Both work extremely well.

The Eye is mesmerising, thoughtful and yet thoroughly entertaining on a purely commercial level. It is further proof that Asian cinema is willing to take on the cgi/sfx of the Hollywood machine and use the technology to tell its own tales in a way that tells a story rather than merely providing eye-candy. (For a further, entirely different way to use cgi check out the totally barmy martial arts/live action anime/soccer comedy Shaolin Soccer - proof that effects work can be stunning without resorting to realism). Hollywood beware.

Reviewed by Colin Odell and Michelle le Blanc