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The "J-horror" genre has had limited success but perpetual releases in American theaters.
The formula goes: find a Japanese horror movie about vengeful spirits of children done wrong, re-stage the movie in America with some fresh-faced Hollywood starlet in the lead role, and have her slowly unravel the spirit's mystery until they understand one another and the ghost moves on.
This makes an easy checklist for "The Eye:" Sydney Wells (Jessica Alba) is a blind violinist who starts seeing grisly spirits and deaths after a corneal transplant and sets off to find her donor. Oh wait, the original movie is from Hong Kong. Looks like we have a genre-buster!
Before Sydney figures out the cell memories of her corneas are sending messages from their deceased former owner, she must deal with hallucinations and close encounters that reach out to her in the real world. She watches normal apartment residents reveal themselves to be specters repeatedly experiencing their deaths.
The scares would be effective in the hands of a better editor. Instead, every rush comes from the score slowly getting louder, Sydney looking ahead nervously, then some angry ghoul with a head wound rushing toward the camera. The only exceptions are a kid ghost whose repetitive creepiness becomes comedy and agents of the afterlife who look like Death Eaters from "Harry Potter." Otherwise, the movie's fright factor comes from treating the audience like an infant in a game of "peek-a-boo."
Speaking of obscured vision, the movie shows things from Sydney's blurred post-op perspective for the first half of the movie. The problem with this is that it reduces the scariness even more since there's no telling what she sees lurking in the shadows. Fear of the unknown is one thing; suspense over blurry figures standing around is boring.
Credit is due to some well-done special effects, mainly whenever Sydney transitions between the real and vision worlds. There are even a couple of fake-outs that would be effective if the movie didn't telegraph them in advance.
A woefully underused Parker Posey plays Sydney's sister, who accidentally blinded her with firecrackers as a child. Her role is like that of all of the supporting characters: refuse to believe Sydney or even to play along. Haven't any of these people seen a J-horror movie?
The greatest failing of "The Eye" is that two other promising stories call out from behind the pitiful narrative like the ghosts Sydney sees. A fleshed-out movie about Sydney recovering from blindness would have made a better drama, and the cornea donor has a backstory that could have been spun into better horror. Instead, poorly done rip-offs of parts of "The Sixth Sense" and "Final Destination" in the final act patch any sense of vision, leaving the audience to stumble blindly toward the light.
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