Directed By Guillem Morales
Starring Belén Rueda, Lluís Homar, Pablo Derqui and Francesc Orella
Slapping an “[Insert Beloved Director Here] Presents” banner on a movie is usually a sure-fire route to disappointment, saddling a small film with lofty expectations that it will surely fail to live up to. But like The Orphanage (also presented/produced by Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo Del Toro), Julia’s Eyes somehow manages to stand proudly in the formidable shadow of its Spanish uncle, solidifying the country’s chilling grip on modern horror and let down only by an unwieldy running time and a few too many twists.
When her blind sister Sara apparently takes her own life in odd circumstances, Julia (Belen Rueda) takes it upon herself to unravel the nagging mystery behind what happened. Her frantic search for the truth sees her contending with creepy neighbours, sceptical cops and an increasingly impatient husband. But as a mysterious figure starts following her wherever she goes, her paranoid suspicions become frighteningly real and made all the more dangerous as the degenerative disease which blinded her sister starts to claim her sight, too.
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Blending a Hitchcockian plot and Giallo visuals with a dash of modern slasher and just a pinch of supernatural fantasy, Julia’s Eyes attempts a lot with its melting pot approach to horror. At two hours, though, it’s unnecessarily long and the story never justifies all the extraneous padding. After an incredibly tense, slow-paced build-up, the movie then unfortunately dips its toe into cliché and implausibility (why Julia keeps returning to stay in her dead sister’s gloomy house – the place where two murders occurred and the scene where she herself was attacked – is the film’s biggest mystery). The film later unleashes a barrage of twists at a rate that borders on near-parody, but half of them come as little surprise or muddy a conclusion that’s already threatening to unfurl into complete ridiculousness.
But a thriller lives and dies by its ability to, well, thrill, and though its story may sometimes stray into silliness, the execution of the film itself is phenomenally good, twisting the gears of tension with pulse-pumping artistic precision. Relative newcomer Guillem Morales jumps at every opportunity to display his skill and ingenuity with the camera; dropping us into Julia’s shoes as she starts to go blind, alongside Belen Rueda’s impressive performance, Morales toys with dimming colour, subtly blurring the screen’s periphery or leaving us in total darkness, while the skulking POV shots ratchet up the tension something fierce. He piles on the trickery by keeping other characters’ faces off-screen as Julia’s condition worsens, lending greatly to the sense of foreboding unease (even if it does make a later twist even more obvious), while a third act stalk-and-slash chase scene lit only by the flare of a camera’s flash bulb is heart-stoppingly taut.
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Julia’s Eyes might not be perfect, and could certainly benefit from the hands of a less merciful editor, but Guillem Morales’s film delivers B-movie thrills with A-grade artistry. The story strays a bit too much into convoluted and silly territory, but the thick atmosphere and abundance of thrilling set-pieces are intensely effective, conjuring more tension and scares in five minutes than most modern horror offerings manage in their entire runtime.
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Optimum’s Blu-ray release delivers the film with a fantastic HD transfer which offers beautiful detail and handles the film’s dark lighting and muted, subtle colour palette perfectly. The Spanish DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is equally impressive, bringing extra weight to Morales’s spookhouse thriller with plenty of ambient creepiness and bass-y shocks.
The special features leave a lot to be desired, though, with just a selection of short interviews and some raw behind-the-scenes footage, along with the film’s trailer:
The Film:
The Blu-ray:
Julia’s Eyes is out on Blu-ray and DVD in the UK from 12th September 2011.
Click here to order the Blu-ray set from Amazon.co.uk.
(Note: The images above were captured and saved at a reduced quality, and though they give an idea of how the film looks, they aren’t intended to reflect the true quality of the Blu-ray image itself.)