Shirley Henderson and Goran Visnjic sex up Nick Willing’s Close Your Eyes, an achievement worth noting given the otherwise neutered condition of this leaden procedural, and that the two actors virtually never touch. Henderson plays Janet Losey, a steel-nerved detective, and Visnjic plays Michael Strother, the vulnerable hypnotherapist with a sixth sense and a haunted past who she bullies into helping her department’s hunt for a serial killer—in this installment, a Mad Libs fusion of child abductor and zodiac occultist.
These early scenes move with the cool slink of skipping stones, mostly due to the point-counterpoint of Janet’s delicate naughtiness and Michael’s coy, smiling deflection. His wife, Clara (Miranda Otto), is eight-months pregnant, and the most honest moment in their subplot comes when she complains about his malcontent attitude and he grumbles, “Sex. I miss sex.”
Willing has a good eye for shot composition. The huge window in Michael’s office acts as a picture-within-a-picture, the traffic-jammed expressway and half-built construction site reflecting his frustrated, essentially unfinished state of mind. Elsewhere, the visualization of Janet’s dream during a scene where Michael hypnotizes her in order to cure her smoking habit is straight out of Alice in Wonderland, a TV version of which Willing directed in 1999.
The references to Hitchcock, Polanski, and Nicolas Roeg are bandied about, but the film adulterates the tight atmosphere of those filmmakers with vacant, modernist gore. At a certain point—say, when a character is disemboweled and has a live wriggling rat implanted in his abdomen—the film isn’t merely bathing in its puddle of grotesquerie, but drowning in it.
Still, like most U.K. horror cinema, Close Your Eyes is braced by its supporting roster of Brit pros: Paddy Considine, Colin Redgrave, Claire Rushbrook, and especially Fiona Shaw, the splendid scene-stealer who burns a swath through the film despite limited screen time and heavy latex poundage. For Visnjic, who is sometimes associated with George Clooney because of the ER hand-off, this is his Out of Sight—the first time his potential as a classic leading man has been granted a pinch of credibility. (The next step is picking better scripts.)
As for the recently ubiquitous Henderson, she continues to strengthen her position as one of England’s finest actresses. The way she manipulates her tiny, brittle physique and weak voice into something sultry and ferocious is astonishing. And Close Your Eyes’s constant motif of Janet’s pale mug and black mop amid a society of tall blondes is also illustrative of the actress’s career status. Like the gone (but in no way forgotten) Katrin Cartlidge, Henderson wouldn’t even register in the eyesight of most Hollywood executives, which is a roundabout credit to the makers of Close Your Eyes. If anything, she’s too big for it.
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