Eye for an Eye is directed by Colin Tilley and the cast includes Whitney Peak, S. Epatha Merkerson, Golda Rosheuvel, Finn Bennett and Laken Giles.
My Thoughts on Eye for an Eye
There’s no shortage of horror movies that begin with a vaguely urban legend-esque premise and a monster designed to look cool in a trailer thumbnail.
And yet, director Colin Tilley, making his feature film debut, takes this familiar premise and shapes it into something visually stylish, but is let down by pacing issues and a fairly formulaic approach.
The film opens with a teen girl dreaming of performing a cheer routine on a rickety stage in the middle of nowhere. As she flips through the air, gravity gives up, and she hangs midair, until it abruptly returns and sends her crashing through the floor.
We then see Anna (Whitney Peak), a Brooklyn teen whose parents have just died in a car crash. moving in with her grandmother May (S. Epatha Merkerson), who is blind. As it turns out, May lost her sight not to age or illness, but to Mr. Sandman back when she was a teen herself. (I am sure you can guess who the grandmother is.)
Anna makes friends with a couple of locals, a sweet, but nervous Julie (Laken Cross) and charming-but-clearly-a-jerk Shawn (Finn Bennett), who ends up pushing a younger kid off a bridge, who barely survives..
Patti (Golda Rosheuvel), the film’s resident folklore expert, then tells the boy about Mr. Sandman and how to summon him. And because this is a horror movie, of course the kid follows instructions. He doesn’t just name Shawn as a target, he also includes Anna and Julie, for being there and not stopping him.
Suddenly, our trio of teens are haunted in their dreams, stalked by a creature they didn’t believe in until it was far too late. That’s the movie’s real hook, not just who the monster targets, but how close the “innocent bystanders” come to becoming complicit. It’s a horror movie, but it's also a morality tale with blood and eyeballs.
But unlike your typical slasher villain, Mr. Sandman comes with a a main rule. He only targets bullies.
Eye for an Eye is a film that could’ve easily just leaned on cheap scares, but Tilley, along with screenwriters Elisa Victoria and Michael Tully, crafts something more atmospheric. The dream sequences for example, work well, and are pretty creative, full of murky lighting, and dripping black goo.
Tilley just lets all the dread creep in slowly. The sound design hums instead of shrieks, and the creature appears gradually, piece by piece, and when we finally get a full look, well, let’s just say the VFX team understood the assignment.
And then there’s the origin story. Yes, Mr. Sandman has one. It’s revealed in a brief sequence that feels like a short film inside the film. But I won't spoil it.
Eye for an Eye does play around with themes, such as guilt, revenge, and moral relativism, but to its credit, it doesn’t get bogged down trying to say something deep, it’s a story about bullies, and the people they hurt. Oh, and revenge.
With that said, the film is slow, especially at the start, and the films story doesn't do enough to warrant the build up, and the runtime should have been cut a bit to help. It's also fairly formulaic as mentioned, and brings nothing new to the table.
If you don't like a slow pace and films more about atmosphere rather than traditional 'scares', you will want to avoid Eye for an Eye. And even as someone who enjoys a slow pace with atmospheric dread, Eye for an Eye never really earns it.
While it certainly isn’t reinventing horror, it still had moments I liked, and of course a dream monster that rips out eyeballs with purpose. That might just be enough for some.