Julia's Eyes (2010)

Julia's Eyes arrives from 2010, premiered at Toronto and handed the opening slot at Sitges, produced by Guillermo del Toro, directed by Guillem Morales, and concerned almost entirely with the business of a woman losing her sight while a man in the walls photographs her. It is a Hitchcock pastiche with a scalpel, and it has no interest in the cultural conversations that would arrive a decade later.

The film's engagement with progressive sensibilities is minimal and incidental. Julia is a woman who investigates a crime, which earns a modest nod in the direction of female agency, though she does so within the well-worn grooves of the stalker thriller, and the film never turns its gaze toward systemic grievance. Her degenerative eye disease supplies a specific medical condition and a great deal of suspense, not an argument about accessibility or accommodation. The villain's pathology, a man who needs women to be blind so that they will need him, is a psychological grotesque, not a thesis. There is no race here, no queerness, no climate, no class war, no body politics, no neurological diversity, no revision of any history. The film is too busy putting a flashlight in a corner.

To score such a picture is to admire its discipline. It commits to atmosphere and to the slow cruelty of its premise, and it declines every invitation to sermonize. The result is a lean, nasty, well-made thriller that will never be asked to speak at a panel. We can respect that. We can also note that it leaves us very little to classify. The remake rights, sold four times over in India and once in Korea, suggest the premise travels well precisely because it carries no ideological luggage at all. A quiet vintage. Almost nothing to decant.