Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 1, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
The latest in the endless line of Asian-horror remakes, The Eye is, as the verbose opening credits helpfully explain, “Based on the Chinese-language motion picture a.k.a. Gin Gwei a.k.a. Jian Gui.” That well-received 2002 film stars Lee Sin-je as a young woman who, blind since early childhood, receives a corneal transplant that restores her sight but also gives her the unwanted ability to see ghosts. The new movie might be more accurately retitled The Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat, since the post-op Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) can not only spot the specters that share the world with us, she hears the screechy, scary sounds they make and has waking, immersive visions of fiery, smoky tragedies that send her fleeing, coughing and choking, from her apartment.
The updated screenplay by Sebastian Gutierrez (Gothika) explains Sydney’s new multisensory sensitivity via the phenomenon of “cellular memory,” in which recipients of transplanted organs acquire the characteristics and recollections of their original owners. This suggests that pretty much the same story could be told under the title The Spleen, and in any case Sydney’s new affliction is more psychic than visual, as she has frightening flashbacks of not only her donor’s past, but to events at which that woman could not possibly have been present.
The muddled nature of The Eye’s explanations and exposition may not be attributable to Gutierrez, however, as this is another in the depressingly familiar pattern of movies that must be judged in the context of their postproduction alterations. Reportedly, the credited (and gifted) directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud of Them/Ils were replaced following completion of their cut by Patrick Lussier (billed as the film’s editor and “visual consultant”), who did two weeks of reshoots to bump up the explicit scare factor. While the film feels seamless in terms of its look, it’s pretty clear that a good deal of these new scenes were added to the first half. A pre-credits sequence was evidently intended to open the movie with a bang but succeeds mostly in draining out some of its mystery, and a moment involving an accident victim, which seems to initially have been one of Sydney’s first clues to her predicament, is now preceded by a couple of much more in-your-face spectral encounters.
Uneven, too, is Sydney’s characterization: At times she’s barely able to put her plight into words, at others she’s rattling off about cellular memory and ghostly “escorts.” Alba is certainly easy on the, er, eyes, but she lacks the gravity that Lee brought to the original Eye’s heroine and that another actress might have brought to this one. (Nonetheless, she and co-star Alessandro Nivola, playing a doctor who helps Sydney transition into her newly sighted existence, do display more energy individually and chemistry together than the somnambulant Shannyn Sossamon and Edward Burns in last month’s J-horror redux One Missed Call.) The moviemakers try hard to tell a story about a girl who may be seeing spirits or who may just be losing her mind, but there’s never really any doubt that the horrific phantoms and scenarios she views really exist/existed/will exist. And the film (like, it must be said, the Asian original) ignores a potentially intriguing question: If a person who has been blind since toddlerhood were to regain their sight and could see spirits of the dead, how would they recognize them as ghosts, having little if any memory of what the living look like?
This Eye eschews that approach by making most of its deceased into makeup-disfigured ghouls or CGI monsters, and a lot of its scare tactics are similarly on-the-nose, with sudden jump cuts and loud bursts of Marco Beltrami’s score. In fairness, it should be noted that the original had its share of obviousness and familiarity as well, and that those behind the remake have successfully carried over a few of its best bits (including a moment of revelation involving a photograph and a mirror). And where the Asian Eye’s major climactic setpiece felt shoehorned into the storyline just to provide some closing-reel spectacle, Gutierrez has more successfully integrated it into the overall narrative, and Moreau and Palud eke some genuine suspense out of the situation. Overall, though, too much of The Eye feels second-hand—and with source material from one foreign country combined with directorial talent from another under the aegis of the compromising Hollywood system, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that something got lost in translation.
