A gorgeous but oddly-paced, disorienting Southern gothic horror.
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Eye For An Eye opens with a fable about the Sandman, a boogeyman that feeds folks nightmares if they dare mistreat others. The introduction is purely text, narrated by a kid and set to a music box track and typewriting noises. Purposely kitsch yet haunting, the perfect tone-setter for what the rest of the film has to offer.
Anna is grieving the loss of her parents in a traumatic car accident, and is forced to move in with her standoffish, blind grandmother. She wanders around a town that can’t seem to move on from its past, with residents walking around with missing eyeballs, and teenagers with no hope for their future, skipping classes to drink beer at the lake.
Anna’s life takes a downturn when she witnesses her new friends bullying a kid and breaking his arm, but fails to help. Nightmares start consuming Anna’s every waking moment, and she spirals into a cascade of sleep deprivation and wondering if what she’s seeing is truly real, or just another dream she can’t escape.
The premise is ripe for unique, effective horror, but I found Eye For An Eye a partially frustrating watch. When the nightmares start to take over, it shifts into what feels like a disconnected series of shots, each more stylish than the previous. Once you get into the mindset that Anna is being sleep-deprived, the offputting pacing makes more sense.
The film could’ve benefitted more from leaning into its original roots as a graphic novel (‘The Sandman’ by Neil Gaiman). Certain points during Eye For An Eye were so reminiscent of Coraline, the stop-motion animated classic from Laika Studios, also about a young girl who moves to a mysterious town with kooky residents and a strong gothic, kitschy aesthetic. Or Jordan Peele’s Wendell & Wilde, another stop-motion about a girl in a small, spooky town.
There’s a reason why stop-motion lends itself so well to horror, despite being thought of as a medium for children. Coming from an animator standpoint, the jerky movements of the characters and the fantastical tone could have translated really well into animation. Even the teenage characters act like cartoonish caricatures of what teens are actually like, and the movie’s monster is already this ethereal, folklorian creature.
Aside from that odd complaint, Eye For An Eye is a disorienting, gorgeous Southern gothic horror with potential, but doesn’t quite push its surrealism enough.
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