![]() And then there is the abrupt non-ending where she crashes in a car, Ewan MacGregor rescues her and they lie conciling in the snow with the supposition left hanging that they will live happily ever after, despite the fact that just five minutes before she tried to shoot him.Ī good deal of this made more sense in Marc Behm’s 1980 novel – there the character of The Eye was a lonely middle-aged man missing his wife and daughter who came to believe that the female serial killer he was pursuing might be his daughter. Director Stephan Elliott offers up a brief childhood flashback about Ashley Judd’s character spending Christmas Eve with her father in a back alley as psychological motivation – but what exactly this has to do with Ashley Judd being a serial killer and shrieking “Merry Christmas, Daddy” every time she kills somebody is anybody’s guess. ![]() The characters are laughably one-dimensional. Ewan MacGregor as surveillance expert Stephen ‘The Eye’ Wilson Most irritating is the casual disregard with which the character is dropped – after being built up as a running character she suddenly announces “If you go, I won’t be coming back” and we never see her again – just like that. It is an effect that, having sat through such phantom figures as Brad Pitt in Fight Club (1999) and Dustin Hoffman in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) in the months just before Eye of the Beholder came out, has become tiresome, despite occasional visual cleverness to the appearances. One annoying plot device is having the central character’s daughter turn up as an Imaginary Companion with whom he keeps having conversations. If Eye of the Beholder has stayed on the path its plot suggests, it could have been passably compulsive – instead we end up with a thriller that seems to have no clear idea what it wants to do and ends up as a mishmash of pretensions and loose plot ends. The plot suggests a blend of Francis Ford Coppola’s immensely underrated surveillance thriller The Conversation (1974) and Black Widow (1987), which featured Theresa Russell as a wig-changing, cold-blooded husband-murderer. To great surprise, it ended up becoming the No. The surprise in this is that its distributor Destination Films was clearly expecting it to pass it out unannounced (there was no trailer or tv campaign) in US release in the dead zone of Superbowl Weekend, 2000, and get the maximum exposure its two stars, Ewan MacGregor and Ashley Judd, would allow it before word of mouth got around. Instead, Eye of the Beholder ended up in wide cinema release, something that only inflated its pretensions and absurdities for all to see. ![]() Its true destination is the 50c video rental shelves, packaged with a salaciously teasing cover and pushed as a trashy pseudo- Basic Instinct (1992) thriller. Eye of the Beholder is not a film that belongs in cinema release.
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