June 6, 2003
By D.K. Holm
The Blair-Switch Project
MY LITTLE EYE
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
MY LITTLE EYE is the best little "horror" movie I've seen in years.
And the rest of the critics at the screening where I saw it hated the film.
If reviewers are any gauge of public sentiment, then this cold, arty, challenging film is going to have a hard time of it. The fact that MY LITTLE EYE is distributed under the banner of the horror genre may be a source of potential problems for this British film in its U.S. release.
For one thing, it is not a conventional horror film. There are no monsters, aliens, and very little gore in real terms. If it is a horror film, it's in the "horror of personality" branch of the genre, which emerged to full flower in the late '50s, early '60s, with PEEPING TOM and PSYCHO its most famous representatives. Technically, I guess, it is a suspense thriller, but the filmmakers or the distributors don't want you to know even that much in advance so that the nature of the "horror" is truly a surprise when it arrives.
The plot is simple, if also now familiar from similar sorts of films and TV shows. Five people answer an Internet ad's call for contestants to participate in a reality program. They have to stay in a large, scary house for six months. If they do, each wins $1 million dollars. If any single one of them departs for any reason, all lose out.
We meet the five at the start of the film via their audition webtapes. This is very important information and likely to go unregistered by the viewer, as some of the auditioners look alike and in any case the movie has just started and the viewers haven't truly settled in yet. In any case, there are clues and misdirections among the aspirants' statements to the contest organizers, so it helps to try and pay attention.
We see the selected contestants arrive at the house, a rambling windy pile located they know not where. They are far from civilization, and snow-bound
Then the next thing we know, the five young people are almost six months into their sojourn, in a place where security lights start up at night if anyone strays beyond the perimeter, and where the occasional dam opening alert sounds through the walls from the distance. There are also hundreds of webcams situation around the house, most obvious, some hidden.
Tensions are starting to come to the surface as the film proper starts. The residents have apparently gone without sex for six months, gone without contact with their family, or with the outside world in general, but for the occasional foil-covered box delivered by the "company," the collective name for the people organizing the contest.
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The five contestants include Emma (Laura Regan), the "nice" girl with short hair. She is the object of lust of Danny (Stephen O'Reilly), a pathetic loser with a family fixation who joined the contest because he wanted to make friends. Emma is contrasted with Charlie (Jennifer Sky), the sexy and sexual pug-nosed one (Catherine Zeta-Jones to Emma's Lili Taylor) who wants to be a movie star. Rex (Kris Lemche) is the Puck of the group (if you remember THE REAL WORLD: SAN FRANCISCO), he's Ewan McGregor from SHALLOW GRAVE. He is the "sexy" bad boy that girls love, the guy who teases the shy guys, is always on the make, is always hustling, and like William Holden in STALAG 17, has a stash of goodies hidden in the floorboards, such as cigarettes — and he doesn't even smoke. Finally there is the most un-self-disclosing male member, Matt (Sean C. W. Johnson).
Though Emma is the ad hoc "heroine," and Rex is the "villain," you sort of expect them to find themselves in love with each other by the end. At least, in a regular movie they would. But in fact, there are hints that Emma's interests are more Sapphic than straight, hence the reason why she spurns Danny, who even gives her a pathetic gift, labored over in the scary basement for six months. And Rex, it turns out, perhaps because of his cynical street smarts and selfishness, is the only one who really "reads" what the Company is doing to the kids.
During the final days of their stay the band is visited by a stranger lost in the woods, named Travis (Bradley Cooper). Like a similar shift in REPULSION, after his visit the film hunkers down for a suspenseful, scary, and rather sickening dénouement. It's hard to take. MY LITTLE EYE has all the cynical revulsion from mankind of Céline, or one of my favorite bleak movies, LADY IN A CAGE, or a Neil LaBute extract from the BOOK OF MORMON
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It doesn't help that the soundtrack is a succession of odd, startling, inorganic, industrial noises. Beeps, hums, trills, and pops all suggest the industrial world far outside the house, as well as the chattering whizzing cameras the cast can't escape, perhaps even the pulsing terror that the characters are feeling (there is only one passage of the now classic "heartbeat" sound). Put together by Mark Ellis, whose band also does some of the film's incidental rock tunes, the soundtrack seems to be following the same path as IRREVERSIBLE, using epilepsy-inducing noise to artificially heighten the anxiety. Some of the noises take residence right in the middle of your head. It's like a trip to the dentist.
One of the things about movies based on surveillance cameras is that cinematic technique that would be considered sloppy in any other context here appears realistic. The camera zooms in, the image turns grainy, the subject is framed off-center, and the sound goes in and out depending on the closeness of the camera to the kids. But unlike BLAIR, MY LITTLE EYE is scripted (the script is credited to David Hilton and James Watkins, whose previous work I have not seen). It's tight, tense work, and the actors have that hardest task of all: not showing on their faces that they know what's going to happen next.
MY LITTLE EYE is directed by Marc Evans, a British filmmaker who comes out of television, like Stephen Frears. He has made something like 10 films before this and his work is assured. His most famous previous film is RESURRECTION MAN, about a Protestant serial killer of Catholics in Belfast in 1970, so he's no stranger to controversy or violence.
MY LITTLE EYE is so entrenched in cinema history that I was a little startled when the other reviewers reviled it. No one who writes about MY LITTLE EYE can escape being indebted to Kim Newman's exhaustive taxonomy in the October 2002 issue of SIGHT AND SOUND. Newman, who writes in the completist spirit of one of my favorite film critics, the late Raymond Durgnat, walks the reader through the whole family tree of EYE's antecedents. Among its predecessors is the "alone in the house to be cut down one by one" type film derived from TEN LITTLE INDIANS. Newman also cites the Italian pop art thriller THE 10TH VICTIM and the King adaptation THE RUNNING MAN, both of which imply worldwide viewers for a carefully created life-or-death set-up (THE TRUMAN SHOW might also fit in here). Recent films along the same lines include the obvious BATTLE ROYAL and SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS. Those films are the tidal pool at the end of the wave of reality games shows that began with the notorious Japanese program ENDURANCE, and its variant Western imitators such as THE REAL WORLD, SURVIVOR, BIG BROTHER, and THE MOLE. Newman, who seems to have the title of every horror film ever in his frontal lobe, also sees a strain of watching-the-watchers films whose Mona Lisa is PEEPING TOM but which was followed by lesser variants such as DIE WATCHING and COVER GIRL KILLER.
Finally, to spoil the ending to a certain degree, there is the whole snuff film strain, including SNUFF and its step-child AMERICAN PSYCHO. Newman makes an interesting point about 8MM: the villains at the heart of that story were given the task of finding a snuff film for a rich client only to learn that snuff films don't exist—so they made one of their own.
The only thing Newman has left out of his family tree is the "staying in a scary house for money" tangent of horror, which includes THE HAUNTING, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL, and THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE. Modern technology has spruced up these old warhorses for today's viewers, but the plots stay the same.
But obviously the immediate inspirations for EYE are THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION, which has nearly the same story, and FEARDOTCOM (along with a film I haven't seen called KOLOBOS). Webcams, houses, and teens all come together in the service of evil VIDEODROME watchers.
Given the elaborate film heritage behind a tiny 95 minute exercise in horror, what's not to like? I got the impression that the local reviewers objected to the fact that the film contains no likable characters. In fact I think that is part of the point (unless there were flaws of casting and conception at the beginning). The film works on a subtle level; we don't know much about the characters because to know too much would be to get clues in a guessing game, whereas the movie is more is more interested in lodging an indictment of a society that breeds empty headed selfish animals to be sacrificed for the amusement of powerful.
The film ends on a grim, despairing note, the whole film coming across not unlike the sequence in HENRY PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER where the viewer sees the dire, shocking footage of a slaying that Henry photographed himself, creating distantiation from the appalling act times three. Emma's savior turns out to be just another emissary from the Company, and she is trapped, handcuffed in the back of a police car as the villains approach. But then, it's a convention in horror films to have the heroine run toward trouble, such as in THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Here the temperature is much lower. The scene is excruciating, because Emma is truly helpless. The closest note of despair in film to MY LITTLE EYE is Michael Haneke's 1997 FUNNY GAMES, a film you do not want to watch if you are depressed.
"So you liked this despairing sounding stuff?," I can almost hear you ask. Yes, I got a kick out of it. Maybe a sick kick, but I did feel afraid and did root for people I didn't really like. Perhaps the film reflects my overall feeling of despair about the world, but MY LITTLE EYE strikes me as the most accurate account of the way we live now that I have seen in a long time.
NEXT TIME:HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE.
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