Ever since Simone Mareuil had a nasty experience with a razorblade in the surrealist classic "Un Chien Andalou", horror movies have always had a special relationship with eyes.
Sliced, poked, gouged and occasionally popped out of its socket, the eyeball has become the most vulnerable, and most traumatized, organ in film history. (Try telling that to Jason Biggs - Ed.)
The latest film from the Pang Brothers takes eyeball horror to new heights, with a story about a cornea transplant that goes horribly wrong.
Blind since the age of two, Mun (Jie) has her sight restored 18 years later by a groundbreaking medical operation.
As the bandages are taken off, she's able to see the world again. But something's not right. She can't recognise her face in the mirror and there's a strange man dressed in black hiding in the corners of her vision. Whose eyes are these?
After the eye-catching (sorry) horrors of recent extreme Asian cinema, the Pang Brothers' latest film is strangely old-fashioned.
For all its technical virtuosity (Danny is an award-winning editor who really knows how to cut a horror movie for maximum effect), "The Eye" lacks the kind of suspenseful plotting that's needed to make you cower behind your popcorn carton.
In the wake of "The Sixth Sense" and its many imitators, Mun's visions of dead people are so conventional that it's hard to find any of this particularly frightening, and as the film reaches its inevitable conclusion in which vision, precognition and tragedy merge, the plot developments might as well have been written out in Braille.
Much like the Pang Brothers' debut, the stylish thriller "Bangkok Dangerous", this is a triumph of style over substance.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but this isn't the kind of horror movie that'll have you closing your eyes in terror. Maybe just for a quick 40 winks.
In Cantonese with English subtitles.
The Eye (Jian Gui) (2002)
