Arrow Video: The Eye (2002) - Reviewed

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Images courtesy of Arrow Video

While Japanese horror or J-horror was on the rise following the release of Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge, Asian horror also started to see a flurry of activity and attention in China as well.  Following the debut film Bangkok Dangerous from directorial duo Danny and Oxide Pang, known professionally as the Pang Brothers, they caught the attention of Three…Extremes producer and The Love Letter director Peter Ho-sun Chan who with screenwriter Jojo Hui mounted the Cantonese/Mandarin/Thai supernatural horror epic The Eye.  A film whose opening credits borrow sound effects and music from Ringu, The Eye which saw two sequels also by the Pang Brothers and three remakes including a 2008 Hollywood film with Jessica Alba for me personally always sort of felt somewhere between Hideo Nakata and M. Night Shyamalan.  Aspects of it will make your hair stand on end, particularly in this new Arrow Video 4K UHD special edition, but still it didn’t reinvent the wheel for Asian horror for me anymore than Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call did.

 
Blind musician Wong Kar Mun (Angelica Lee) undergoes an experimental cornea transplant surgery which restores her vision, illuminating the world around her.  However, there’s a caveat: now she can also see gruesome visions of the dead The Sixth Sense or V/H/S 2 style.  Initially conveying this to her psychiatrist Dr. Wah (Lawrence Chou) who is skeptical about her claims, the visions worsen with ghostly black apparitions coming to claim the spirts of the recently deceased.  Then one morning, she wakes up and discovers to her horror it is not her reflection looking back at her but the spirit of some other entity that has attached itself to her.  Desperate for closure and normalcy, she and Dr. Wah venture out to Thailand in search of the donor they got her new cornea from.  As it turns out, Ling (Chutcha Rujinanon) was no ordinary donor but had the second sight ability to see premonitory visions of imminent disaster.  But can they find out what Ling’s spirit is looking for before it takes suicidal possession over her new host Wong Kar Mun?

 
Drawing heavily from the Bangkok gas explosion on New Petchburi Road on September 24th 1990 which killed 88 people and destroyed 67 cars as well as a report in the Hong Kong press about a 16 year old girl who ad a corneal transplant and committed suicide soon thereafter, The Eye is more or less the Hong Kong version of Ringu replete with elements of the detective thriller as characters travel great distances to obtain clues pertaining to the strange phenomena.  On the one hand narratively it is conventional despite having a pan-Asian cast and crew with a Malaysian lead actress Angelica Lee who gives an otherwise powerful scream queen performance, a Chinese-Canadian singer Lawrence Chou, a Signaporean singer Pierre Png and Thai actress Chutcha Ruhinanon.  The crew also included Thai cinematographer Decha Seementa and Thai music group Orange Music and audiovisually the film looks and sounds lovely in between being hair raising. 

 
On the other hand where it does work pretty well, much like Ringu, is in its ability to terrify by having a phantom slowly nebulously careening towards the camera.  Some of its best scenes come in the first thirty minutes when our heroine takes her bandages off her eyes and can faintly see shapes and shadows but can’t make out why one of them is floating closer and closer to her face.  Another standout scene involves an elevator spirit with its head hung low, something only she can see like a scream one can’t emit, playing on fear of the uncanny.  Moments like this can still give goosebumps even to seasoned horror fans but the denouement for me diffused much of the tension that had been built up over the course of the movie.

 
Whatever your stance is or isn’t on this movie (I’m still split on it years after seeing the Palm Pictures DVD back in the early 2000s), Arrow Video’s 4K UHD is a vast and welcome improvement over previous releases.  Palm Pictures’ DVD was a PAL to NTSC transfer originally, resulting in ghosting on the image which in theory can benefit a film like this but it was nice to finally see it without that PAL/NTSC conversion patina on the image.  Sound wise it still packs a decent punch with frequent use of the building of strings by Orange Music.  Arrow Video have also included in addition to an archival making-of press kit a new video interview with Peter Ho-sun Chan, a visual essay by Heather Wixson and an archival featurette on directors Danny and Oxide Pang.  Though the sequels haven’t been included in this release, something which perhaps Arrow will resolve down the line, this new UHD of The Eye is most certainly the definitive home video release of this Chinese horror freakout.  While I’m still divided over the thing as a whole, Arrow’s disc won’t disappoint fans keen on seeing the ongoing expansion of East Asian horror.

--Andrew Kotwicki