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MY
LITTLE EYE
6/10
UK/Canada/US 2002 : Marc Evans : 95 mins
Though
shot in Nova Scotia with North American actors, My Little Eye is
a British production – a cut above recent UK genre entries like Revelation,
Long Time Dead
and Dog Soldiers.
It’s essentially an old-school horror movie tricked up with new-school
technology and zeitgeist-surfing nods to the internet and Big Brother-style
reality TV. In terms of recent movies, the basic horror-equation is Series
7 meets Session
9: a murderous ‘reality’ based broadcast, shot with grainy digital
vision and even grainier digital sound, following hapless potential victims
as they wander down the dark corridors of a remote rural building.
Snared
by an internet advert, five contestants are selected to spend six months
in an isolated rural mansion. If all five manage to last out to the end,
they will win $1m (presumably split five ways, though this is never made
too clear) The action proper begins in the final week of the stay, with
the winning post in sight. A series of increasingly sinister events start
to take their toll on the residents: introspective Danny (Stephen O’Reilly),
clean-cut Matt (Sean C W Johnson), nice-but-dim Charlie (Jennifer Sky),
cocky rebel Rex (Kris Lemche) and nervy Emma (Laura Regan). Is ‘The Company’
trying to scare them into fleeing the house in terror? Or could there
be a more sinister explanation?
The
pay-off is, unusually for a horror movie, the most satisfying aspect of
My Little Eye – there’s no shortage of ideas here, the contestants’
growing suspicions about The Company producing an agreeably unsettling
mixture of paranoia and claustrophobia. Concept-wise, scriptwriter David
Hilton has one foot in the ‘control by external forces’ territory of The
Game and Das Experiment,
and another in the more familiar zones of terror established by the likes
of Halloween and Blair Witch.
Like
Blair Witch and Series 7, My Little Eye is constructed
entirely from ‘found’ footage: everything we see is picked up by the hundreds
of hidden cameras supposedly positioned all over the house, complete with
a tinny whirring whenever one of the pans or zooms in on their subjects.
Director Evans and cinematographer Hubert Taczanowski get a little carried
away at times, inserting gimmicky shots taken from the ends of a torch
and pen, but other innovations are much more successful. They make especially
spooky use of the ‘night vision’ button on their DV cameras, making the
characters’ retinas glow an eery iridescent white among the dark green
shadows.
 The
young, no-name cast do well with their deliberately bland characters:
especially noteworthy are Regan (coiffed, shot and lit to resemble Mia
Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby) and Lemche, who has a great scene where
he languidly ticks off the web-cast’s ghoulish viewing public – and thus,
implicitly, the film’s audience as well.
When
push comes to shove, however, Evans isn’t quite up to the nuts and bolts
of the horror genre. The most effective shocks are the most basic old-school
‘boo’ jolts – but when the bodies do finally start piling up, there’s
an increasing reliance on distractingly flashy camerawork and an even
more distractingly heavy-handed use of pounding music. This clumsiness
is most evident in a decapitation scene near the end – Evans makes brilliant
use of sound (the victim is watching a film on TV) then goes and ruins
the effect by switching into juddery slow-motion for the swing of the
axe.
There are more serious problems with the script – not least the fundamental
structural awkwardness of, barely minutes in, spooling forward from the
group’s arrival to their final days: we never really feel that these people
have been holed up together for six whole months. While Evans does his
best to build tension, he’s repeatedly undermined by the numerous holes
in the plot – and, worst of all, the identity of the killer is too easy
to spot, too early on: though not quite as easy and early as in Session
9, it must be said. And it’s conspicuous that most of the second half’s
plot points depend on the very handy visit of an outsider who leaves behind
all manner of handy gadgets and tools. But the final reel is sufficiently
strong to outweigh these quibbles – bold and dark, with plenty of blood
on the floor.
18th
August, 2002
(seen 14th, Cameo Edinburgh - Edinburgh
Film Festival)
For an interview
with the director Marc Evans click here
For all the
reviews from the 2002 Edinburgh Film Festival
click here.
by Neil
Young
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