A sleek, impressively well-made movie, a lyrical flower in a bed of January thorns, if you will. It is simply too admirable a film on too many levels to be thrown to the wayside.
Eye of the Beholder (1999)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:85
Fresh:8
Rotten:77
Average Rating:3.4/10
Consensus: Improbable and muddled.
Runtime: 1 hr 41 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis:
Eye of the Beholder is a startling journey into obsession, the story of an intelligence agent so taken with a beautiful killer he cannot bear to apprehend her. Set in the surreal world of a...
Eye of the Beholder is a startling journey into obsession, the story of an intelligence agent so taken with a beautiful killer he cannot bear to apprehend her. Set in the surreal world of a high-tech voyeur, the tale follows him across the country as he embarks on a desperate quest for this enigmatic femme fatale.
Ewan McGregor stars as The Eye, a lonely, isolated British intelligence agent who has lost his wife and daughter, for which he blames his own unforgivable inaction. Yet detachment is part of the job.
The Eye's current mission is to track Joanna Eris (Ashley Judd), a woman suspected of blackmailing the son of a senior British official. But Eris is far more than a blackmailer. She is a seductive, shadowy master of disguises, a frenzied murderer, a lost orphan and an abject mystery whose rage is as fierce as her beauty.
The Eye cannot help but be fascinated by Joanna - especially when a surveillance photo of her seems to reveal the ghostly image of his long-lost daughter, whose absence haunts him. In his deepest fantasies, their two fates as lost souls are somehow connected. As he follows Joanna from murder to murder, the more The Eye finds that he needs to watch her. Not capture her. Not speak to her. But watch her, becoming inexorably more and more obsessed with what he sees. He shadows Joanna without ever letting her know he is there - except that sometimes unexpected turns of fate make it seem as if she has a guardian angel watching over her.
But the closer The Eye gets to Joanna's life, the more dangerous his fantasy becomes. Soon he begins to meddle in her existence, taking action, altering her fate. Yet to catch her would be to lose her, something The Eye cannot allow again in his life. So the odyssey continues . . . until the pursuer and the pursued find themselves on a perilous crash course.
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Ashley Judd, Patrick Bergin, K.D. Lang
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Ashley Judd, Patrick Bergin, K.D. Lang, Ann-Marie Brown, Jason Priestley, Geneviève Bujold, Charles Powell
Director: Stephan Elliott
Director: Stephan Elliott
Screenwriter: Stephan Elliott
Producer: Nicholas Clermont, Tony Smith
Composer: Marius De Vries
Reviews for Eye of the Beholder
Saddled with a somewhat drab and reactive role, McGregor tries hard to make us care about The Eye, but it's an uphill struggle.
Eye of the Beholder wants to be an art film and a thriller. It fails at both aspirations. If you'll pardon the expression, there is far less here than meets the eye.
A film that is genuinely unpredictable, but only because nothing in it makes sense.
There was probably some intended meaning behind this hullabaloo of nonsensical imagery, but somehow it all gets lost.
Eye of the Beholder is nothing more than a mediocre mystery-thriller trying to bask in the glow of its star, Ashley Judd.
This one might turn off the MTV generation eager for a succession of slam-bang episodes, but will fulfill the hopes of those who believe that vigorous inner action is of more dramatic note than plot-driven, exterior movement.
If you're looking for more plot development -- or a sensible denouement -- forget about it.
The tone is stillborn and static when it should be ominous and engrossing. The characters fail to connect with the audience. This is a cold, distant, and off-putting motion picture that generates little in the way of tension or suspense.
Eye of the Beholder is yet another example of how bad movies can happen to good people.
I didn't get it at all, but I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to be a cult classic. It's that oblique.
Sinks under the weight of bad storytelling and the filmmaker's pretensions.
Its neo-noir, psych-thriller signifiers don't just provide goofy flash via flashback but service a grief-concerned narrative in which time and space collapse into a surrealist black hole.
Latest News for Eye of the Beholder
July 05, 2005:
In Other News...Roman Polanski, Ewan McGregor, and An Ally for Brooke Shields
Controversial director Roman Polanski will make an appearance in court this month -- not to continue his infamously interrupted 1977 statutory rape case, but to testify in... More...
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