Ray Pride

Eyes are the window of the ghoul.

At least that's the case when you behold "The Eye," a supernatural kiss from the other side, an eerie Asian sibling to "The Others." This sleek new Hong Kong-made horror by the Thai-born Pang Brothers has a becalmed style punctuated by bursts of spine-tingling terror.

Delicate, patient, yet freighted with dread, their story of Mun (Lee Sin-Je), a 20-year-old woman whose vision is restored by a corneal transplant eighteen years after losing her sight, is a fully accomplished version of what Mark Pellington seemed to be attempting in his absurd yet tingly "The Mothman Prophesies."

Perceptual snaps and brittle editing instead of gore-and-bore accompany Mun's acclimation to the world of sight. Her first sights resemble the out-of-focus world of the lifetime myopic who won't submit to the knife of the radial keratomist. She starts seeing things; yes, everything is new, spooked and spectacular. An unfamiliar nightlight gloaming alternates with daylight's blinding bright. But there's residual memory on the transplanted corneas. Unsettled spirits seize her nights and days.

There were some cool special-effects-driven notions about how to depict what's known as "facial vision," the impressions that motion leave on the face of the blind or sight-impaired in this spring's "Daredevil," but the Pangs play with simpler means. Start with the main titles alone: fingertips move behind a stretched-taut white sheet, like beads of Braille letterform, or worse, an anxious, restrained creature under the skin, ready to poke out into the glare of life.

Seen and not seen; heard and not heard; directed indirection. With their third feature, the Pang twins masterfully array those dialectics of the horror-film vocabulary. These pan-Asian filmmakers return film to the form of dream, a gale-force maelstrom of what the artists at Mad magazine used to call "eyeball kicks." (Of course, the American remake from Tom Cruise's company will have more rigid rules, a painfully obvious structure and reams of explanation, honing some of the nerve-jangle down to logic and a PG-13 rating.) Like the new wave of Asian horror that is fathering the new wave of American remakes, the effectiveness of "The Eye" lies in its cross-cultural suggestiveness. The ideas about ghosts and visions are ka-POWs that speak to any audience in Asia, but to American anxiety and trepidation as well. The many films and filmmakers discovered by festivals and critics and only just now trickling onto American art-house screens have a one-up on American moviemaking. They're not required to reduce their visions to the tattoo of plot points. The stippling of impression in mad profusion is completely acceptable to their financiers and, as time has proven, audiences as well.

The Pangs are severe and sure editors who understand vision and sound. Adept at the shock of the "Boo!"--knowing when fwwwwwaps, shrills and zzzzsschhaas of sound can take the breath away, they're also adroit at the vocabulary of blur. In art and video of the past couple years, everyone tries to be Gerhard Richter, working the artful smudge, the painterly swipe. One current example, both notable and dull, would be photographer Thomas Ruff's manipulations of Internet pornography (http://www.postmedia.net/ruff/nudes.htm). For Ruff, blur is a formal matter, an indulgent mannerism. But even with their glossy, commercials-honed skill at composition and pacing, such effects are all part of the fabric of the Pangs' film. Everyday dread, the sort tamped in our cultural psyche by a fistful of SSRIs, is more about the loss of love, hair, a paycheck. The Pangs are getting closer to meta-fears, the fear of being afraid.

"Eyeball violence" is a phrase a colleague of mine has often used before the words, "Oh nooooooooooooo!" Trying to describe "The Eye" in simplest terms to a couple of friends has elicited a similar reaction: one woman's crystalline blue eyes were visible a split-second before her hands flew up to protect her sight (instead of ears) from the very idea of the film.

"It takes time for the eye and the brain to work together," the doctor reassures Mun and her family once she begins to see. The Pangs take ninety-eight minutes to wreak havoc between eye and brain, and I was gratefully, blissfully tremulous for at least ninety-seven of them. And yes, you should keep at least an eye open.

"The Eye" opens Friday at Landmark Century.

(2003-06-18)

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