THE SKINNY
Professional voyeur falls for murderous damsel in distress.

THE BOTTOM LINE
Skip it in the theatres. May be worth renting if the only other video in the store is Bicentennial Man.

THE FULL REVIEW
Let me start by saying that nothing you read in this review should be taken to be even the slightest hint of a recommendation to see Eye of the Beholder. By just about any measure, this film falters. It was the most unthrilling of thrillers. There was something about Eye of the Beholder, however, that kept me from wanting to walk out on it even as I questioned writer/director Stephan Elliot’s inspiration for creating such a mess.

Eye of the Beholder is based on a 1980 noir novel written by Marc Behm. The film tells the story of a British intelligence agent called The Eye (Ewan McGergor - The Phantom Menace, Trainspotting, Brassed Off), who’s current mission is to track Joanna Eris (Ashley Judd - Double Jeopardy, A Time to Kill, Normal Life), a woman suspected of blackmailing the son of a senior British official. But, there is much more to both of these characters than initially meets the eye. Eris is filled with a hidden rage that stems from her abandonment by her father on Christmas day at a very young age. This rage manifests itself in Eris by turning her into a savage male killer. The Eye is tormented by the terrible guilt he feels for letting his daughter slip out of his life after having neglected his family for so long. Somehow, The Eye’s anguish enables him to connect with Eris in a way that causes him to feel deeply responsible for her salvation and leads him to develop intense feelings of intimacy toward her.

To his credit, by the end of the film Elliot does manage to bring the audience to feel sympathy toward Eris. However, this is more a function of the fact that the men whom Eris kills are so easy to despise, rather than the audience having developed a deeper understanding of this character during the course of the film. There wasn’t much else in Eye of the Beholder that worked. The story was contrived, the acting was mediocre, the score was ineffectual and annoying, and much of the film’s action appeared to take place in some bizarre world where things never seemed quite right. Perhaps this is why the film was able to keep my interest. I had been expecting the see the standard Hollywood cookie-cutter suspense movie; what would be at best, a poor man’s Basic Instinct. Elliot, however, delivers nothing of the sort. His film has a unique, surreal and perverted feel to it, giving it a distinctive style. Elliot attempted to walk that fine line that sometimes exists between creativity and absurdity and unfortunately lost his balance and landed on the wrong side.

By: Craig Ettinger