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Eye of the Beholder (1999)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:19
Fresh:1
Rotten:18
Average Rating:3.2/10
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
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Reviews for Eye of the Beholder
As misogynistic as anything I've seen in ages, it's tricked up with enough fancy cinematography (by Guy Dufaux) to guarantee it sub-Hitchcockian credentials of the sort that some reviewers eagerly hand out to Brian De Palma.
Remove the directorial flash and filigree, and its narrative would be easier to track.
It's late January, winter is entrenched, and in the lull between the bounty of Christmas and the renewal of spring, the big screen can sometimes seem barren -- a movable famine.
In trying to both inflame and indict our morbid curiosity, Elliott fails to make the needed connection between the audience and a peeper who has lost his moral balance.
This mangled project is neither great art nor grand entertainment but, because it floors the pedal for both, it has a certain resplendent awfulness.
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.
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.
Eye of the Beholder attempts to convey emotional dislocation and passion at the same time. All we get is distance.
The movie might be worth seeing if you could find a theater that offers frequent-flier miles.
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