By Linda Winsh-Bolard
Remake of a Hong Kong film.
As a child Sydney (Jessica Alba) had an accident while playing with her sister. It cost her her eyesight. Despite that Sydney grew up to be a successful concert violinist adapted to her world and the conditions of it .It is her sister, Helen (Parker Posey), suffering from guilt, who pursues the option of cornea transplant. When Sydney is 27 a donor is found and a double cornea transplant is performed.
Sydney is learning to live with visible world, a skill she’s lost during her years of blindness, but even when the shocks of new expectations and additional senses are accounted for, she has some very unusual, and rather unpleasant, additional experiences.
It takes her some time to understand that she sees not only the dead and dying but also the “guides”, the shadow like, unpleasant figures that take the living away. Naturally, nobody believes her.
How complicated things are dawns on her when a little girl, whom she met in the hospital, Anisha, leaves her a picture they took together. Sydney looks at the woman in the photograph and sees a stranger. Everybody else sees Sydney. She sees the same stranger in the mirror, mute, but communicating stranger who sends her horrible visions of fire and death.
Sydney persists in her attempts to find out who her donor was, what has happened to her and what does she want from her.
Her journey goes to dust laden, forgotten village in rural Mexico where her donor, Ana Christina Martinez (Fernanda Romero), lived and died. Her neighbors thought Ana was a witch.
Except for a relatively straightforward narrative there is little else to the film. It is not possible to be astonished, or even mildly surprised, neither by the ghost like guides, nor by the second vision because the film market overflows with those for a long time.
The transition from blindness to vision is well done, and the whole process was painfully close to me, who had temporarily lost vision once due to infection and had an eye surgery. The hope one feels to see again plays nicely in the film and although Alba is a scar and swelling free, not at all realistic, she manages to give the feeling of surprise at seeing at all and the transition from blur to normal is true enough.
There are few interesting episodes; one the aforementioned mirror-photograph, another an encounter with newly created ghost, a result of a car accident Sydney witnesses. Many are trite, breaking glass and bleeding pages that freak Sydney but are unseen by others. These fail to frighten. The effects and the story twist are ordinary. There are the expected loud noises and the final devastating crash combined with self-sacrifice. The frantic does not play well, and the overbearing tendency to overwhelm by color and sound comes off flat. There is so little tension that you might considering watching the film before you go to bed. The dialogs are capsules of popular culture such as:” The world is truly beautiful.”
The acting is ordinary. Nothing really stands out or marks the film as more than average.
At the end the violin solos and the little girl Anisha are the only two noticeable and memorable things.
The 2002 Hong Kong version has spouted two sequels and a Hindi remake, one hopes Hollywood would not follow this well over trodden path.
Lionsgate/Paramount Vantage
Lionsgate and Paramout Vantage present
a C/W Prods. production in association with Vertigo Entertainment
Credits:
Directors: David Moreau, Xavier Palud
Screenwriter: Sebastian Gutierrez
Producers: Paula Wagner, Don Granger, Michelle Manning
Executive producers: Mike Elliott, Peter Chan, Roy Lee, Doug Davison, Michael Paseornek, Peter Block, Tom Ortenberg, Darren Miller
Director of photography: Jeffrey Jur
Production designer: James Spencer
Music: Marco Beltrami
Costume designer: Michael Dennison
Editor: Patrick Lussier
Cast:
Sydney Wells: Jessica Alba
Dr. Paul Faulkner: Alessandro Nivola
Helen Wells: Parker Posey
Simon McCullough: Rade Serbedzija
Running time -- 97 minutes
