Needle in the Eye

After I’d seen Blind Terror starring Mia Farrow in 1971 I swore I’d never watch a horror movie again. I was about 15 at the time, but I broke that oath quite often and did so again this weekend.

The thing about Farrow is that she probably brought out the protective instinct in older men with her fragile voice and porcelain-doll looks, but if memory serves (and it doesn’t very well, as we all know), there weren’t any point-of-view shots. That would have meant the screen had to go black because she was as blind as a bat from the start.

Things are slightly different in Julia’s Eyes, a film the marketeers go to great lengths to say was produced by Mexican master Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth).

For one the titular Julia (Belen Rueda) has fading sight, a POV we often see, but when she goes completely blind we still have black POV shots – to great effect. This is all enhanced by the excellent cinematography of Oscar Faura, who also shot Del Toro’s haunting The Orphanage.

Secondly, there is nothing doll-like about Rueda. She is a blonde, full-blown Spanish woman and she is infinitely desirable. Yes, she’s a little overwrought, like the film itself, but who cares? We will do anything to, well, see that she finds her twin sister’s killer, if indeed he or she exists. Sometimes these Latinos can imagine all kinds of morbid things, you know, especially if they have a Catalunian disposition like director Guillem Morales.

So, a film that's also about seeing. There are even references to that iconic image of an eyeball being slit in Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou. This time, however, it’s a syringe that enters said orb, though it might have been more effective if we didn’t see the needle actually piercing what looks like material. Morales should have studied his Cronenburg. Suggestion might have been more effective. A slight popping sound perhaps? 

But imagine having to act blind while your killer has a very sharp knife millimetres away from your pupil, testing you. Rueda does a great job and has us on her side from start to finish.

But is it a good story? Well, it’s full of twists and turns that certainly kept me on the edge of my seat, but the plot did start getting implausible towards the end. Julia was starting to do quite a lot for a blind and blindfolded person and, frankly, if my killer offered me a mug of boiling water filled with poison and I knew it, locked up in his (or her) house, I would simply chuck it in their eyes and brain them with anything at hand.

Another Dali-esque reference pertains to Julia’s husband (Lluis Homar) seeing the universe in her eyes, literally. That, and the conceit that the more emotional Julia gets the more her eyesight will deteriorate, is much more acceptable than Lars von Trier’s twaddle about planet Melancholia heading our way to destroy our Danish angst.

Neil Sonnekus