Guillem Morales serves up another slice of Spanish horror/thriller in Julia’s Eyes channelling the spirit of earlier del Toro productions The Orphanage and The Devil’s Backbone.
Beginning with an extremely tense and unnerving opening scene Julia’s Eyes plays its cards very early on in the hope that no one will see fit to call its bluff. The opening introducing the overarching horror elements that audiences will be subjected too. The very primal fear of blindness, the dark and ultimately just what is lurking in the corner of the room? Anyone who’s had any childhood at all will feel a pang at this most basic of fears.
Sara, the titular characters estranged twin, stands alone and blind, suffering from the same optic degeneration as her sister, but sure she can see someone. The faceless tormentor drives her to her ‘suicide’. The ripple effect of her actions draws Julia (Belen Rueda) into the mystery of her death left behind despite her increasingly failing sight, conveniently compounded by situations of stress or anxiety. These moments of reducing sight are possibly the least well handled area of the film with them drawing to mind such things as losing a bar of health in a video game.
Rueda’s performance, however, is extremely well balanced with her descent from scientist to ghostbuster demanding empathy. A wholly believable vision of a sightless yet determined tormented. Julia’s husband Isaac (Lluís Homar), most known from Broken Embraces in which he ironically plays a blind writer, adds weight and relief to a film in which nothing is certain and everything is creepy. His disappearance serves as an ominous break and a step up in Julia’s demise into nightmare. While on screen though the two convey a believable and wholesome portrayal of man and wife who are each in their own way confronting different aspects of her pervading disability; Julia who longs to keep her sight to find the mysterious boyfriend and Isaac who longs to keep her safe despite the path she’s been pushed on to which he can neither endorse or deny.
The progressing narrative plays very much on del Toro staples of keeping the audience guessing. Treading a line between natural and supernatural but always managing to ground a movie in realism (even the elves in Hellboy II were living next to the subways). In turn there is no departure from reality here with the ultimate root of malice being the tormentor’s lack of any notice from society, a theme that was also drawn out in the recent Confessions to a much more nuanced reflection. A poignant, if quite blatant, metaphor for the alienation of the modern world and the self serving, inward looking nature of the modern self.
Beautifully shot with some pieces of technical and artistic brilliance; scenes following Julia’s operation in which her fellow characters remain faceless objects captures well the isolation and frustration of sightlessness and just wait for the final confrontation. Layered with atmosphere and rich in suspense the film succeeds in toying with basic instinct fears; the sometimes helplessness of being and feeling blind, the dark and the fear that you might just have seen something in the corner of your room…
The brilliant feature comes complete with some interesting and insightful interviews from the creators and the cast.
Extras:
Interview with Guillermo Del Toro
Interview with Guillem Morales
Interview with Belén Rueda
Interview with Lluís Homar
B-Roll
