There have been many horror films that had the protagonist foreseeing the future especially death. The not so recent one in Telugu was Neelakanta’s Maya . The Bhatts known for churning out murder mysteries loved it and are remaking it in Hindi. Horror films based on such a premise immediately capture the imagination of the audience but the challenge lies in how the film-maker executes it and sustains the interest till the end. In Maya , we had seen a child getting a vision of an impending disaster, of that person’s death; she grows up and continues to face the turmoil in her personal life as well but what ailed the film in Telugu was, there were not enough examples of after-death incidents of the lead character. In Eyes it is just an exact opposite. The film-maker fills the film with enough events to convince the viewer that the character is genuinely facing a problem, but that doesn’t make it a fine story technically.
Eyes is almost a 90 per cent remake of the Hong Kong-Singaporean film, The Eye made in 2002. The Malayalam film went to the sets in 2013 and was released last year with Meera Jasmine as the lead artiste and Shajiyem as the director. The dubbed version has a prelude that has no connection with the film whatsoever and makes us wonder how it is related to the core subject. It starts with a foetus, apparently a female addressing the mother and pleading her not to abort her as it hurts her a lot. As the titles roll, it is an entirely different story. The co-incidence or similarity between Maya and Eyes is most of the story runs on how frequently they get visions but only before the film ends they rush to help a person from dying, the emphasis is more on their suffering rather than they bailing out people from danger.
Chandralekha (Meera Jasmine), a blind television anchor of a game show takes a break for two weeks to get a cornea replant. She is shown to be enjoying her life despite being differently-abled but the moment she regains vision, her life takes a drastic turn and she begins to wish that she goes blind again. Why does a woman who lost her sight twenty two years back wishes to go blind after seeing the world forms the story.
It takes time to register Meera Jasmine’s presence in the film from the first frame to the last, as one, she comes after a long break and then she has put on weight which is unsettling to our eyes.
The film is not a bad watch provided one ignores the poor technical quality that impedes our concentration.
