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Brothers Danny and Oxide Pang have twin obsessions: genre pics, and the theme of sensory deprivation. They first caught the attention of the West with 'Bangkok Dangerous', an assassin-for-hire revenge drama featuring a deaf-mute protagonist, and now they have turned their hand to horror with 'The Eye', a creepy ghost story about a blind woman who gets to see more than she bargained for when her sight is restored. Grabbing the audience right from the start with an unrepeatable trick opening and a credit sequence designed to present - in purely visual terms - the experience of losing one's sight and of being blind, the film is full of optic inventiveness, moving gradually from its shadowy, unfocussed beginning to an apocalyptic finale where the screen explodes with light. If you feel as though you have second sight as you watch 'The Eye', that is because its plot has been patched together from a number of other films. A young woman (Lee Sin-je), blinded since early childhood, undergoes a corneal transplant with frightening consequences (as in 'Blink'); she sees dead people (as in 'The Sixth Sense'); she sees tall shadowy figures whose presence tells of imminent death and disaster (as in 'The Mothman Prophecies'); she travels with a male friend (Lawrence Chou) to the distant home of a dead girl (Chutcha Rujinanon), in the hope that she can put the girl's soul to rest and bring all these supernatural events to an end (as in 'Ring'); hell, she is even visited by an exorcist (as in 'The Exorcist'), albeit a Taoist one... Yet what the film lacks in narrative originality (or, for that matter, in credible characterisation), it more than makes up for in heart-stopping terror. Elderly hospital patients, boys who have lost their report cards, wives visiting their husbands at work, domineering calligraphers, quiet men in lifts - ordinarily none of these would inspire much fear, but under the Pangs' capable direction they will all have you wishing, like the protagonist, that you didn't have to look anymore. And the final sequence, while not exactly relevant to anything which has preceded, is so eye-poppingly spectacular and so monumentally over-the-top that it alone is worth the price of admission. Subtle it ain't, but 'The Eye' is a welcome addition to the growing market in Asian horror. Looking for a visceral chill? 'The Eye', as they say, has it. Anton Bitel, 28.01.03 |
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