For Her Eyes Only
Film: "The Eye"

By Tommy Tung

Riding on the coattails of "The Sixth Sense," "The Ring," and "The Mothman Prophecies" is "The Eye," an Asian horror film whose greatest evil is not so much appropriating from its predecessors, but floundering uselessly in the story department. Though the high-concept premise hooks you right away: Mun (Sin-je Lee), a blind woman, undergoes a cornea transplant and begins to see ghosts; "The Eye" dawdles for the next hour as Mun meets ghost after ghost without any progress toward resolving her curse.

Perhaps the screenplay looks something like this: "See a ghost. See Mun get scared. Repeat as unnecessary." This prescription would be perfect for a scary carnival ride, in which ghosts come out of the woodwork every second, discordant sounds blasting behind them, but "The Eye" is a movie, after all, and it suffers from plot underdevelopment. We don't often learn anything nor do we see Mun gleaning any understanding of the events. Not until the last half hour does Mun actually investigate the cause of her sightings.

"The Eye" mitigates the shortcomings of the screenplay with its striking photography and slick editing. Former Hong Kong editors and commercial filmmakers, Danny and Oxide Pang, direct this film with visual bravura and save it from becoming a complete yawn. The editing builds a creative rhythm of straight cuts and dissolves-refreshing for our eyes and for the pacing. The art direction subverts genre expectations by setting most scenes in the daytime, blanching the warm sunlight to become cold blue pallor. As for the eye of the movie, the camera prefers telephoto lenses, confining Mun to spaces that are sharply focused and claustrophobic. Even more uncomfortable are the tight close-ups on Mun's anxious face as she shares an elevator ride with a ghost.

On a thematic level, "The Eye" bears little resemblance to "The Sixth Sense" or "The Ring," since the Pang brothers insightfully weave in the cultural fabric of Chinese and Thai superstition. (Possible spoiler ahead) Towards the climax of "The Eye," Mun discovers that her cornea donor was a Thai village girl who could see ghosts and deaths before they happened. The girl was ostracized by her community and branded a witch, which is an accurate description of Thai peasant psychology. It's no secret that much of rural Thailand today follows an animistic belief system, erecting spirit houses to placate wandering souls.

What would have given "The Eye" a 20/20 perspective is an integration of stories, seeing ghosts and seeing for the first time. Mun hasn't seen anything since the age of two. She can't read or write. She has no conception of color, light, shadow, or three-dimensional spaces. Dr. Wah (Lawrence Chou) sets up these ideas in the beginning, but somehow "The Eye" completely displaces her sensory ineptness for the sighting of ghosts, when the true horror that Mun suffers is living in a world of unappealing vision.

July 18, 2003

Relevant Links:
http://www.mongkolfilm.com/theeye/index_th.html
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/TheEye-1123211/about.php