Julia's Eyes
Rating: 7/10
Cast: Belen Rueda, Lluis Homar
Director: Guillem Morales
A Spanish horror/ psychological thriller which set Spain's box office alight, Julia's Eyes shows up with the tag, produced by Guillermo del Toro and with the weight of expectation.
Rueda (who made such an impact in arthouse thriller The Orphanage a couple of years back) is Julia; when Julia's blind twin Sara hangs herself in her basement, Julia suspects foul play.
But Julia, like her twin Sara, suffers from a degenerative eye disease causing her to gradually go blind - and as she investigates further, she finds her eyesight failing and sliding into darkness.
Combined with the fact Julia's hunt for a killer throws up more questions than answers, it becomes a race against time for her as her eyes begin to fail and the killer begins to get closer.
Julia's Eyes is atmospheric, claustrophobic, unsettling and well acted - but at times, it does lapse into a "there's a killer in the house, let's run around blind (literally)" kind of horror, which is a shame as it detracts from the genuinely spooky start and feel of the flick.
Rueda is immensely watchable as the twins - and her growing horror is evident and well acted thanks to a restrained performance which is empathetic and gripping. With a creeping sense of "there's something just out of the corner of my eye", Rueda reels you in.
It's just a shame that the story lapses into a few horror
clichés and loses some of its freshness as the ever so
slightly overlong story unspools.
