The Eye

The Eye is an eerie, slow creeper of a horror movie in the tradition of Japan's 1998 genre-defining dramatic horror film Ringu, which got the Hollywood remake treatment in 2002 as The Ring with Gore Verbinski in the director's chair and a hot Naomi Watts starring in it. After China's The Eye made a similar splash upon its release, it's likely to get a similar treatment now that Tom Cruise's Cruise/Wagner Productions has snatched up the remake rights. The Eye is a ghost story, which is not a new concept, but the Pang Brothers imagine it through the eyes of a blind woman who, thanks to a corneal transplant, has recently got back the eyesight she lost 18 years ago at the age of two. Unfortunately, Mun (Lee Sin-Je) starts to see things others don't seem to notice. Unable to even recognise a stapler without actually touching the object, she finds herself having difficulty differentiating between the real and spiritual, which adds the new dimension that makes The Eye an extremely creepy ghost story and sort of lends credence to the Sixth Sense comparisons. With the help of her doctor, Wah Lo (Lawrence Chou), Mun's search to discover why she sees these things leads her to the donor of her eyes and a disaster that seems all too familiar. The plot contains more drama and is slower than what North American audiences might be used to in their current horror, but the creepy tension builds to an explosive effects-laden climax that is a formidable money shot, which is impressive even to those afraid of the "foreign" film. The "making of" featurette reveals a few interesting tidbits about The Eye, including the two real-life stories that formed the foundation of this ghost story. The Eye is yet more proof that the future of horror is outside of Hollywood. Plus: theatrical trailer, more. (Palm Pictures/Mongrel Media)