THE EYE

A blind violinist has her sight restored by way of a corneal transplant, but also transplanted to the unsuspecting patient is the deceased donor’s hideously bad luck.

CAST: Sin-Je Lee, Lawrence Chou, Chutcha Rujinanon, Candy Lo, Pierre Png, Edmund Chen

DIRECTORS: Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang

"Before I had any idea what the movie was about — before the opening credits even concluded — ‘The Eye’ had already reduced me to a state of trembling, goose-bumped dread…Rarely has the basic nature of visual perception seemed so frightening. And the audience's confusion — what are we looking at? can we trust our eyes? — mirrors the peculiar predicament of the heroine…Ms. Lee, much more than a standard horror-movie shrieker, looks convincingly haunted by what she sees, and the Pangs' pictorial instinct is as sure as their shock-producing sense of timing." --A.O. Scott, The New York Times

"It’s a chilling tale of a blind violin player named Mun (Sin-Je Lee) who receives a pair of transplanted corneas. And sees things she can’t explain: figures that loiter at the edges of her vision or deep in the background, and that do not move in logical ways...I hope this description doesn’t suggest that ‘The Eye’ is simply an Easternized remake of ‘The Sixth Sense’…where Shyamalan wants to scare us and uplift us at the same time, the Pangs just want to scare us. But they’re eerily good at it…Like De Palma, the Pangs are so technically fluent that they can joke about their own mastery while they’re scaring the bejesus out of you…Viewers who love a good fright will want to see this movie; filmmakers will want to see it more than once." --Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Press

"A canny academic should be able to glean that there is nothing more than meets this ‘Eye’ than a couple of slick young acolytes of action director John Woo hoping to make an easy buck…If you always feel 10 steps ahead, it is probably because you've seen at least 10 other movies that have toyed with the same elements, either in their original language or the inevitable American remakes." --Jan Stuart, Newsday

"Already optioned by Tom Cruise for an American remake, this Hong Kong thriller by brothers Oxide and Danny Pang is so creepily atmospheric you may not care that you've seen much of it before…From the eerie opening credits to the gasp-worthy climax, the movie specializes in the sort of chills that sneak up on you, rather than the big, cheap scares you find at the multiplex. It's unabashedly derivative and spooky enough to keep you up at night." --Elizabeth Weitzman, The New York Daily News

"Its ‘I see dead people’ premise is shopworn, but Hong Kong brothers Oxide and Danny Pang manage to deliver real skin-prickling jolts with their minimalist horror film…much credit must go to the touching central performance by the young Malaysian singer-actress Lee Sin-Je…The love story comes off as cheesy and there's an overreliance on crashingly discordant sounds and the fright-cueing score. But Mun's attempts to retreat back into her blindness are heart-breaking and the visuals are never less than striking." --Megan Lehmann, The New York Post

"…strange, stylized cross between medical procedural and ghost thriller. At its best when detailing the protagonist’s attempts to integrate herself back into society, at its hackneyed worst when relying on cheap horror tactics for easy shocks." --Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine

"In the agreeably spooky horror movie ‘The Eye,’ a beautiful young woman discovers that seeing isn't just a matter of believing -- it's a question of believing in ghosts…This is the third feature from filmmakers Oxide and Danny Pang…the brothers clearly know what they're doing behind the camera and in the editing room. Their sense of pacing is nicely arrhythmic, which makes the ‘boo’ moments all the more heart-thudding, but what's even more pleasurable are the pockets of quiet, those lacuna of low-frequency dread when nothing much happens. Whether Mun is scaring herself in a mirror, adrift in a corridor flooded with sickly algae-green light or watching fat drip off a roasted duck like blood, the Pangs remind us that nothing is more terrifying than life, not even death." --Manohla Dargis, The Los Angeles Times