Mun (Angelica Lee) has been blind since she was 2 years old. She’s lived a contented life despite the disability, but then she is given the chance to have her sight restored through a cornea transplant. The surgery is successful and Mun sees for the first time, though blurry she can make out the outlines of people, however she needs more time before she can see properly. Spending some time in hospital she befriends an 11 year old girl who has the bed next to here, named Ying Ying she has been in the hospital for a long time with an aggressive tumour in her brain. The two of them play and take a picture together, while Mun’s sight very gradually starts to improve. One night, Mun sits awake in bed in the middle of the night when she sees a dark figure approach the old lady in the bed opposite her. The figure rouses the old lady and leads her out of the hospital ward and into the corridor, Mun’s vision is still not good enough for her to make out who the figure is however. Puzzled, Mun follows the pair into the corridor and her blurry vision picks out the old woman, who moves around her ethereally before disappearing altogether. The next day Mun wakes to find that the old lady in the bed opposite had died during the night.

Confused but not knowing what to make of it, she has only just regained her sight after all, Mun continues her recovery and leaves the hospital. She is assigned a psychotherapist to aid her in her transition, named Dr. Lo (Lawrence Chou), he is the nephew of the doctor who performed the cornea transplant. Back at home with her grandmother, Mun watches home video footage of her as a child, when she hears a knock at the door. It’s a small boy, head bowed and face hidden by a baseball cap, asking if Mun had seen his report card from school. After trying to talk to him, only to have him vanish, Mun is left even more confused, not knowing that the boy had killed himself after not being able to face the disapproval of his parents after losing his report card. As Mun tries to adapt to the whole new dimension added to her life, she starts having nightmares of places she doesn’t recognise, and starts to see people nobody else can, terrifying her. Dr. Lo is the only person who seems to believe her but has no idea how he can help, and as her visions get more intense and she is driven closer to the edge, Mun needs to find the truth before it becomes too much for her.

The Eye does not have the most original of concepts. The ‘transplant gone awry’ thing has been done (look at Body Parts or the awful third story in the horror anthology Body Bags) where a transplant from one person to another has disastrous results, then mix in some The Sixth Sense/Stir of Echoes ‘I see dead people’ and there you have it right? Thankfully, I don’t think so. I have to admit that I have yet to see either Stir of Echoes or The Sixth Sense but The Eye certainly cuts a stylish path for itself between the slasher sequels from the west and the Ring copyists from the East. The Pang Brothers have created a distinctive and eerie psychological horror, from the opening sequence which spells the credits out in Braille while a hand pushes from the other side of a white screen in the background, to the numerous and extremely creepy encounters with the spirits Mun sees, this is clearly a superior chiller. The supporting cast are solid and back up the story well, but this is Angelica Lee’s film and she does a great job in the role of Mun. Giving a sense of warmth to her character while also giving compelling performances during the creepy scenes when the occur, she makes you care for her character, and her strong screen presence makes it extremely difficult to take your eyes off her whenever she is on. One has to give great credit to Danny and Oxide Pang (and Jojo Hui for co-scripting with the pair) for giving Angelica a chance to perform beyond just being an under-developed scream queen, as they give as much time to Mun’s emotional response not just to seeing ghosts but to seeing at all. You can’t help but have an emotional response as she looks at herself in the mirror for the first time, hardly able to believe she is looking at herself. While you are happy for this very sweet woman for finally being able to see, you see it affect her life negatively too, the blind people’s musical group she was once a part of playing the violin no longer want her because she is no longer blind.

It seemed every effort was made to give humanity to Mun and not let her just become a tool for the scare sequences, and the film has a lot more depth and a heart because of it. That’s not to say that the film isn’t balanced between the horror and the characterisation though, as there are a number of unsettling scenes that punctuate much of the film. These are superbly done, and vary in delivery from simple ‘look away and he’s gone when you look back’ shots to clever use of Mun’s blurred vision, to some more elaborate CGI effects. Some jarring, some more restrained and menacing, Mun’s ghostly encounters are filled with excellent use of sound, and greatly aided by Angelica Lee’s believable reactions which start as mere confusion and develop into outright terror. One could say that there is a hint of the sort of haunting atmosphere witnessed in Ring and its ilk, but its certainly not derivative, and does actually produce more genuine scares than the Japanese classic.Unfortunately The Eye does not succeed in sustaining the mood for its whole duration, as the change of scenery towards the end of the film actually changes the feel of the movie quite noticeably, though by then the film has you so completely in its grasp it doesn’t really matter. While elements of its conclusion may leave some a little dissatisfied, it certainly came a little unexpected to this reviewer and that can only be a good thing.

This film twists and turns, the respite the more character-based scenes provide serves only to make the next scare that much more unexpected and enjoyable, and any fan of a good chiller will find much in this film’s 96 minutes to enjoy. Well written, compelling and stylishly shot with good performances and a very good lead actress, The Eye has become an instant Radi0active Death favourite and is possibly the best Far Eastern horror movie since Japan’s Ring.