One in the Eye

It’s an age old dilemma – if you do something wrong, should you confess or just keep quiet and hope you get away with it?

Some would say honesty is the best policy and this is the approach taken with The Eye, which self-consciously admits its massive debt to The Sixth Sense (via, of course the original “Eye” directed by Oxide and Danny Pang).

However, overtly referencing The Sixth Sense, as The Eye does when a character asks “What? You see dead people?”, doesn’t excuse the blatant plagiarism that’s taken place here.

The plot is simple enough. Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) has been blind since she was five. She gets a cornea transplant and suddenly she can see dead people. In fact, she also gets to hear, smell and feel strange things as well, for some inexplicable reason. There’s some talk of “genetic memory” but even Sydney’s psychiatrist is sceptical about that, so how are the audience supposed to believe it?

And plot-wise, that’s pretty much it. Whereas The Sixth Sense built the suspense towards its shock conclusion, The Eye meanders for the next hour or so as Sydney just sees more and more dead people in lifts, hospital corridors and restaurants. These encounters do provide some unpleasant shocks but there’s no connection between them, no real plot progression and certainly no suspense.

The film eventually gets into gear when Sydney decides to track down the owner of her new eyes. This sets up a big-bang resolution that finally provides some drama but feels a little tacked on and again suffers by a self-conscious film reference, this time to Speed.

The cast do their best to muddle through it all. Let’s face it, this sort of film is about Jessica Alba’s level but it’s a shame to see the excellent Allessandro Nivola and Parker Posey wasted in paper-thin supporting roles.

In the end, as with other remakes of Asian horror movies such as The Ring, this does nothing to improve on the original and commits an even worse crime – even at the cinema it feels like the cheap DVDs you can buy in supermarket car parks: a decent Hollywood movie ripped off then sold back to the consumer at cut price.