All I See Is You (2017)

Marc Forster's All I See Is You arrives with the polished surface of a prestige psychodrama and the pulse of something much colder. Blake Lively plays Gina, a woman in Bangkok who has been blind since a childhood accident and who submits to a corneal transplant at the urging of her husband James, played by Jason Clarke with a studied, needling neediness. When her sight returns, so does her independence, and the marriage begins to curdle. James liked being necessary. He liked being the one who described the world. The film watches this with a clinical patience that is occasionally striking and frequently airless.

The picture carries a genuine if muted feminist current. Gina's arc is one of reclaimed autonomy, and the film is clear-eyed about the possessive machinery that surrounds a woman who has learned to see. It is not a manifesto. The men who orbit her, a brother-in-law, a stranger at a pool, a doctor, mostly serve as evidence for the thesis that James is the problem. The casting, meanwhile, is almost entirely white, with Thai performers drifting through the Bangkok scenes as background texture. The film shoots on location in Thailand and Spain and has nothing whatsoever to say about either place beyond its postcard value.

What the film does not do is preach. There is no sermon here about climate, class, or the body, and no attempt to revise history, because it has no history to revise. Its gaze is fixed on the intimate cruelty of a marriage, and it trusts ambiguity to carry the weight. That trust is admirable and largely unrewarded. The film grossed less than a million dollars against a thirty million dollar budget, which suggests audiences found the ambiguity less intriguing than the filmmakers did. A stylish, chilly, ultimately hollow exercise. The kind of movie that respects its audience and forgets to give them a reason to stay.