fludd.org - Movie Review

Few people would expect Hong Kong to do a horror movie, since the old colony is more known in the West for its action movie. As you’ll probably notice it while watching this good movie, The Eye is, without a moment of doubt, a nice horror flick that is a little bit similar to the internationally acclaimed American movie The Sixth Sense. Even though many people might not like The Eye, I’m sure that Asian cinema purists will certainly appreciate it the same way they’ve appreciated the South Korean horror movie A Tale of Two Sisters because both movies have the same narrative structure if you pay attention to the details.

As it was said in the introduction paragraph, The Eye shares a similarity with The Sixth Sense, which means that the central narrative element in the story is the fact that a character can see things that ordinary people can’t see: the soul of dead people. Besides that common element, The Eye doesn’t have anything else in common with The Sixth Sense, but both movies are not as scary as they look. While The Sixth Sense was a simple movie, but nonetheless remarkable, that evolves quite slowly without creating much surprise, The Eye is, on the contrary, a movie that evolves quite quickly and unpredictably with moments of surprise.

The astounding directing style of the Pang brothers provides to The Eye a nice personality for the movie. In fact, the original filming technique and the very well composed music are both elements that certainly help us to develop a particular interest for this very unpredictable Asian-style horror movie. In my opinion, what really makes us stay in the movie is definitely the way the story was built. Unfortunately, some Westerners might not necessarily appreciate the storyline’s structure, because at the beginning, the viewers are facing all kind of events that don’t seem to make any sense at the first look. However, let it be said that everything that we want to know is revealed at the end, because this part of the movie helps us to unmask all the curtains of mystery in order to thoroughly understand The Eye.

Obviously, in a few scenes of the beginning, the main character, which means Wong Kar-Mun, is making so many dreams and she sees in her dreams many places that she has never been to. As the movie advances, Kar-Mun will do her best to go back to the source in order to fully understand why she constantly sees the soul of dead people. While the first act of the movie is showing us how much Kar-Mun is destabilized at the moment when she discovers the fact that she can see dead people, her attempt to go back to the source of her problem will make her understand what it means to be so different and also if it’s really worth it to see the world with eyes.

Unfortunately, the problem with The Eye is that it lacks a little bit of psychological expression from the characters, because the quick pace of the movie doesn’t give us a good window of time to study the psychological profile of the characters and furthermore, the movie piles up an incredible amount of scenes that are probably meant to scare us to death (the movie is not as scary as it looks) with long exposures and well filmed scenes in which Kar-Mun expresses all her fear. Speaking about psychological profiling, the movie offers us an explicit and also implicit revelation of the characters’ feelings, but with its lack of depth, The Eye is not as psychologically deep as A Tale of Two Sisters, because there are too much scenes in which the characters express their fear more often than they ought to. All in all, even though it’s a pretty ordinary horror movie, The Eye is certainly a horror flick among many others that stands out of the competition thanks to the solid and credible performance of the members of the cast, especially from Angelica Lee, as Wong Kar-Mun.

Finally, The Eye is certainly not a masterpiece that will bring revolution to the genre of horror movies, but on a very positive tone, this fascinating and unpredictable Asian-style horror film does show us a new face of the Hong Kong cinema, which means a cinema that tries to explore other fields that so many movie directors in the old English colony don’t even try to go in, mostly because comedy and action movies are part of the trend in Hong Kong. Furthermore, if so many attention was given to foreign movies in the Western countries, I’m sure that The Eye could have won a very prestigious award especially for its visually superb cinematography.

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