Julia’s Eyes

Original title or aka: Los ojos de Julia

Director: Guillem Morales
Starring: Belen Rueda, Lluis Homar, and Pablo Derqui
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Runtime: 108 mins. Reviewed in Nov 2011
| JustWatch |
Rating notes: Strong violence
This sub-titled Spanish thriller film begins with a young woman, Sara, who is blind, and filled with fear, stumbling through her house to its basement. There she attempts suicide while her imaginary tormentor stands watching. Her terror, however, is real as her tormentor kicks the stool away from under her feet when she changes her mind, and goes to loosen the rope. Following Sara’s death, her twin sister, Julia, arrives with her husband, Isaac (Lluis Homar) to bury her. Julia, like her sister, has a degenerative eye disease, and is slowly going blind. She begins to suspect that her sister’s suicide was murder, and it is not long before Julia thinks she is being followed, just as her sister was. Isaac (who was having an affair with Sara) doesn’t believe her, but Julia asks him to help her unravel her sister’s death. Isaac mysteriously disappears one night in a parking-lot, and is later found hanging in the same room where Sara died. Julia has visited the hospital for the blind, where Sara was an inmate before her death. It is there that she learns that Sara had a boyfriend, who might be the imagined tormentor, and who could be the shadowy figure, who stood behind her at her sister’s funeral.

The film is filled with gothic images, and parts of it are very violent. The acting is melodramatic, stagy, obvious and clumsy, but gloriously intense. Only Spanish cinema can deliver a horror film that is this bad, and this good. The film builds up images that furtively show how the loss of sight victimizes one in a hostile world. The result is creeping claustrophobia. Co-produced by the master of Spanish fantasy-horror, Guillermo del Toro (who gave us “Pan’s Labyrinth”), the film makes us feel as trapped as Julia. Set pieces, such as the encircling group of women at the hospital for the blind, are used very imaginatively, and Sara’s house becomes a sinister character in the story that unfolds. Everything is seen through Julia’s fading gaze.

The film is most effective when it darkly builds up its atmosphere. We fear with Julia as someone’s hand mysteriously touches her shoulder, but the identity of the person, revealed at the conclusion of the film, is not as compelling as the mystery that surrounds his tentative touch at Sara’s grave-side.

The camera work in the film by Oscar Faura is excellent, and the film makes very original use of light and shade to illuminate its effects. Belen Rueda plays the part of both Sara and Julia, and the film projects an original display of what makes quality horror cinema from Spain so effective. There are hangings, slashings, eye-piercing, ponderous music, and lethal electrocution. The film carries a lot of surprises, as its plots and sub-plots twist and turn, and it has more than a passing dependence on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”, with a touch of Claude Chabrol thrown in for good measure.

The film is not for the squeamish, and it earns its classification warning. Two particularly violent scenes are those of a bloodied-body pinned to a wall with a kitchen knife, and a gruesome throat-cutting scene involving the shadowy figure, who was the person responsible for it all. True to type, the film concludes with Julia being given Isaac’s eyes to help her see again. These kinds of scenes are all typical of the horror genre, and are used creatively by the film’s director, Guillem Morales.

If one looks for thriller cinema in horror mode, this movie delivers an uneven series of creepy and violent scenes in a richly sombre style. Under the watch of Guillermo del Toro, it is a long way from compulsory viewing, but it predictably delivers an imaginative punch in a very effective way.

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