ON CIRCUIT: The Eye and Married Life.
The Eye
This is a Hollywood reworking of the 2002 horror-thriller by Thai film-makers Danny and Oxide Pang, which itself owed much to John Carpenter’s The Eyes of Laura Mars from 1978. Like the original, it has hints of Ghost, The Sixth Sense, The Mothman Prophecies and even the Oliver Sacks case-history, filmed as At First Sight. It isn’t bad.
Jessica Alba plays a blind violinist — a fact that, I know, should call for the three monosyllables ‘Oh”, ‘My” and ‘God” moaned in ascending pitch and volume. But, actually, she more or less gets away with it. The idea is that she gets a cornea transplant and can see again but finds herself plagued with horrifying visions, courtesy of the previous, traumatised donor.
This is because of something scientific called ‘cellular memory”. It’s the ‘peptides”, explains Jessica’s hunkily concerned doctor, Alessandro Nivola: ‘They connect the mind and body.” Oh, I see. — Peter Bradshaw