Apr 102002
 
three reels

A blind woman, Wong Kar Mun (Angelica Lee, also known as Lee Sin-je), is given an eye operation that restores her sight.  But her blurry first images include dark shapes that visit the beds of the dying.  Soon she is seeing the dead everywhere, and she starts to break down.

One of the more significant entries in the new wave of Asian horror, The Eye mixes two well used American stories: the standard ghost story and the “transplanted body parts keep a memory of their past” story.  And right away we see the problem.  An eye that is still attuned to its original owner is not the stuff of A-movies.  For a time, it looked like it would be a cleverer film, when it is suggested that Mun was always special (in the magical sense), but never knew it as she was blind.  Now that she can see, she sees far too much, but that notion is blown away.

The first half is effective.  As Mun has been blind since the age of two, she can’t even identify normal things.  When her doctor holds up a stapler, she has no idea what it is until she touches it.  So, she doesn’t initially understand that she’s seeing more than everyone else, and doesn’t even have the vocabulary to explain.  As she learns, The Eye makes it terrifyingly clear that there are some things better not to know.   This would have been pretty dull in a typical American movie, but the Asian new wave knows how to make things frightening.  Several scenes, particularly a calligraphy lesson with an extra student and a slowly approaching ghost in an elevator, are filled with Ringu-level scares.

Unfortunately, the film shifts from horror to mystery as Mun and her helpfully bland psychologist search for information on her cornea donor.  I don’t think I’m giving away anything to say that she used to see the dead too.  The detective work is unimpressive, and the mystery is no mystery at all.  It’s not bad; it’s just routine.

There’s also a tacked on climax after the “mystery” is solved, which is the most irritating part of the film because it makes Mun out to be the stupidest person you’d ever meet.  Apparently, she’s learned nothing from her experiences in the rest of the film, or from the life of her cornea donor.  If she’d behaved in a way that grew from the previous 90 minutes, the ending could have had real power.

The Eye is a watchable picture with a few great scares and many lost opportunities.  We’ll see what Hollywood can do with it in the 2006 remake.

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