Review: The Eye

Comparisons between The Sixth Sense and minimalist fright flick The Eye, directed by brothers Danny and Oxide Pang, will be inevitable. Mun (Angelica Lee), a blind girl in her twenties, receives a corneal transplant and begins to see strange happenings as she regains her sight: a young boy outside her apartment keeps asking for his report card; a girl at a calligraphy class asks for her chair back; and a boy running from a bloody car accident walks right through her. This goose-pimply tale of clairvoyance and redemption willingly acknowledges its allegiance to M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 blockbuster but has a more difficult time distinguishing itself from Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (not surprisingly, The Eye was recently optioned for a Hollywood remake) and the undervalued The Mothman Prophecies. Mun travels to a remote village to visit the family of the young woman whose eyes she received. Via requisite monochrome flashbacks, she learns that she has inherited the dead girl’s ability to prognosticate mass destruction. As the film spirals to its apocalyptic finale, it becomes clear that the Pang Brothers care as much for their heroine’s plight as they do for the seductive dialectic between the living and the dead. Mun claims to have learned from her experience but her serene expression suggests the only thing she’s learned is to check a donor’s psychological profile before taking their organs. The Eye inherits the hokey melodrama of the Pang brothers’ yakuza flick Bangkok Dangerous but none of its libidinal techno fury. The film is elegantly composed and offers the occasional fright but its minimalism is as calculated as its story is annoyingly familiar.