Impenetrable mess of a movie.
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
It's strictly surrealistic style over substance in this weird, wannabe psychological thriller.
Eye of the Beholder is like one of those optical cartoons that were so popular a half-decade back; the more we concentrate, the less we see.
So hyper-conscious of its own movie-ness that it’s hard to care very much about the characters moving listlessly through its scenery.
Eye of the Beholder suffers from blurry vision at best. Don’t let your eyes behold it.
Eye of the Beholder more or less throws Vertigo, The Conversation, Body Double, and -- so help me -- Duel in the Sun into a blender and hits puree.
The many strengths include the edgy mood and unpredictability of the action, and the internalisation of psychological and emotional terrain through the effective soundtrack
A disturbingly hypnotic odyssey not unlike Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo or Brian DePalma's Obsession.
In spite of the careful visualization of the mechanics of these characters' worlds, Eye of the Beholder does little to convincingly support the subjects' reasons for inhabiting them.
Latest News for Eye of the Beholder
July 05, 2005:
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