Movies: Some Very Bad Visions

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When a movie has a blind female protagonist, you know you're in for a fright. Directors love to take an actress like Audrey Hepburn or Madeleine Stowe, make her doubly vulnerable—and then send in the stalkers. That's the intention of Hong Kong director-brothers Oxide and Danny Pang for The Eye, which carries the tag line: "Why do I feel so afraid?"

The "why" is the film's unique twist. The heroine, a character named Mann (played with cool elegance by young Malaysian actress Angelica Lee), went blind when she was two years old. Fourteen years on (where the film begins) she has a sight-restoring corneal transplant, only to suffer complications: nightmares, shadowy visions and ghostly visitations. She peers in a mirror and sees another woman, Ling, the original owner of the cornea. After a spooky visit to her organ donor's home village in Thailand, Mann deduces she's inherited Ling's psychic powers and has to exorcise them or else possibly die.

In lesser hands, this would be standard seer/stalker material. But the Pang brothers' slick camera work and sly editing transcend the usual. (They've shown they can elevate themselves above genre before: Bangkok Dangerous was more than just a gangster flick.) The Pangs know the secret of scarification: it's the anticipation, not the revelation, that pulls us in. Coherent, classy and spine-tingling as hell, the best compliment you can pay it is that, two days after seeing it, you can't get The Eye out of your head.