Guillem Morales
Con gli Occhi dell'Assassino

Usually, when I decide to talk about a movie on Debaser, it's either about a masterpiece or (more rarely) about a tragic dud. With this review of Con gli Occhi dell'Assassino, instead, I express my opinion on a movie that's absolutely avoidable yet still watchable and enjoyable. But let's start from the beginning.

Con gli Occhi dell'Assassino is a 2010 film directed by Guillem Morales and produced by that great genius (a rather debatable definition, I know) Guillermo del Toro. The first time I saw it was in 2010, at the cinema, with a few friends. At the time, I wasn't yet a fan of cinema (nor, for that matter, of horror) and I enjoyed watching it a lot. To summarize the plot in a few words: Julia and Sara are two twins suffering from a vision problem that slowly leads them to blindness. The film opens with Sara's suicide, now desperate because of her illness. However, Julia can't accept that her sister would have done such a thing, so she decides to investigate. What awaits her is far beyond what she could have ever suspected.

I cannot lie: this film is full of flaws, especially at the script level. Plot holes, predictable and sometimes a bit forced twists, characters not very developed: in short, to the eyes of enthusiasts, this film might seem like a half mess, saved only by Morales’ more than good directorial quality, which manages to have fitting ideas that overshadow the writing flaws. All the tension that arises in the audience does not, therefore, come from the screenplay ideas, but from the artistic ones, like never showing faces when Julia becomes blind, or the execution of scenes in the dark. On this last aspect, I want to pause for a moment: a very sad trend in modern cinema is to make “dark” scenes very bright. When, in a movie, a character is forced to move in the dark, the viewer is perfectly aware of what surrounds the unfortunate person and has to witness an almost comical situation in which someone pretends not to see anything, despite being in full light. Morales, on the other hand, does something as simple yet, evidently, not obvious, as about 6 years earlier James Wan did with the first installment of the saga Saw: he turns off the light and no one can see. Neither the characters nor the viewer.

Con gli Occhi dell'Assassino is not a film from which to expect who knows what: it's a simple movie to watch with the brain turned off. A simple commercial film with the sole purpose of entertaining the spectator. A product destined for the masses who watch films just to spend an hour and a half without committing too much, like 90% of contemporary cinematic works. The fortune of this film is that it was made in Spain, a country where the level of commercial cinema is quite high, as in France and England, which are, in my opinion, the three European countries with the best genre cinema (no need to mention the French masterpiece "Martyrs").