Ewan McGregor tends to make interesting films, and Eye of the Beholder is one of them. It’s the kind of thriller Hitchcock might have made were he alive today; it certainly plays with his perennial themes of voyeurism, desire, secrecy and power.
McGregor is a surveillance expert, employed by some shady governmental agency, with all the latest techno-tools at his disposal. A haunted loner, he develops an obsession with a woman con-artist he is employed to watch, and that obsession rather takes over what life he has. Ashley Judd, doing much better than in the dire Double Jeopardy (and looking a lot like Charlize Theron), plays the con woman with the requisite layers of mystery; McGregor handles very well the role of a man with a quiet surface hiding deep compulsions and losses. Jason Patric is almost unrecognisable in a very nasty cameo.
Inventively filmed, and with an alternately pounding and whooshing soundtrack by Björk collaborator Marius de Vries, Eye of the Beholder absorbs and intrigues for the length of its running time. Once it’s over, though, one begins to ask whether it all adds up, and whether the climax was really a climax — and to wonder if that wasn’t perhaps the point.