Notable Cast: Angelica Lee Sin-Jie, Lawrence Chou
Chun-Wai, Candy Lo Hau-Yam, Edmund Chen, Yut Lai So, Chadatirud Lertaveesin,
Yin Ping Ko
In college, I became obsessed a bit with Asian ghost films.
Sure, it was the 00s, and everyone and their mom had jumped on the J-Horror
boom a little, but I started digging much further and trying to get my hands on
everything that I could. One of those was The Pang Brothers’ massively
underrated The Eye (2002). Although it would be remade and memory-holed
by most of the cinematic world in 2008, this Hong Kong horror film had managed
to capture quite a bit of attention in the social circles I was navigating.
That’s on top of the fact that the Pang Brothers were quickly becoming a new
name in Hollywood at the time, even if those 15 minutes of fame would quickly
fade thanks to a system that handicapped so much of their more interesting
approaches with limited budgets or incredibly terrible scripts.
Nonetheless, The Eye was a film that I had latched
onto, and my memories of watching it on a possible bootleg I purchased at the
FYE where I was working were very positive. Now it's damn near 20 years later,
and Arrow Video has decidedly graced us with a new 4K release in the US, and I
was eager to finally get a chance to revisit a film that definitely struck a
chord with a much younger me.
The Eye might secretly be one of the best ghost films
in the post-2000s cinematic era. There’s something uniquely intimate and soft
about the film. It works in subtle ways, less concerned with scares and
traditional ghost horror and more focused on the growth of its lead character,
Mun, as she comes to terms with her abilities and what they mean both to her
and thematically.