See No Evil (2006)

The 2006 slasher See No Evil arrives from WWE Studios with a premise of admirable economy: eight delinquents, one rotting hotel, and a large man named Jacob Goodnight who removes eyes with the efficiency of a hotel maid turning down a bed. The film was panned, grossed a modest sum, and spawned a sequel on home video. Our task is not to relitigate its quality but to measure its social consciousness, a pursuit that proves mercifully brief.

On the matter of representation, the cast is diverse in the unremarked manner of an ensemble assembled for body-count purposes. Christina Vidal and Michael J. Pagan appear, and Jason Chong, and the film never acknowledges this as anything other than a group of teenagers who will be killed in ascending order of likability. There is a final girl, technically two, and a female villain in Margaret, the killer's mother, who lured the authorities back for revenge. The film builds no framework around any of it. Margaret is a mother with a grudge, not a statement.

The villain's motivation is religious fundamentalism, rendered as a set of tattoos and a cage, which the film treats as texture instead of argument. No sermon follows. No lesson is drawn about faith or its abuses. The homeless-shelter backdrop sits there, inert, inviting no critique of property or poverty. This is a machine for producing corpses, and it is honest about that. The cultural ledger stays nearly blank. A slasher from a wrestling promotion in 2006 had no interest in instructing anyone, and it did not. There is something almost restful in that. A sequel followed, and we may assume the ledger remained blank there as well, though that is a question for another session and possibly another critic with more stamina than I currently possess. The eye motif, at least, is thematically consistent. Everyone loses something, and no one learns a thing. That is the whole of it, and there is no shame in a film knowing exactly how little it has to say.

These are the notes of a tired man, filed under Horror, Thriller, and the year 2006, where they will rest undisturbed until the next classification exercise demands their exhumation. The final girl survives. The ledger does not move. We mark it down and move on to the next screening, which is the only professional dignity available to us in this line of work. The eyes, for the record, are returned to no one. They never are. The film ends, the credits roll, and the assessment is complete. Nothing is taught. Nothing is challenged. The corpses are catalogued and the file is closed without ceremony, which is, in its own small way, a kind of integrity. We score accordingly and we do not linger.

Something about a hotel, a hook, and a heart impaled on glass. That is the entire cultural contribution. It is enough to fill ninety minutes and not one second more, and the classification stands unchallenged, a small monument to a film that wanted nothing from us and received exactly that in return. The ledger is closed. We move on.

The end of the matter, then, is a shrug, and the shrug is final. No further remarks are warranted, and none are offered. The film exists. So do we. The difference is negligible on a long enough timeline, and the timeline here is short, roughly eighty-four minutes by the standard cut, which is more than sufficient exposure to this particular cultural artifact. The assessment concludes. The ledger remains closed. We file it under nothing at all, which is where it belongs, and we do not look back, because looking back is how the eyes get taken in the first place, and I have grown fond of mine.

In sum, the picture is a slasher, the slasher is a slasher, and the cultural accounting is a near-total nullity. I have said this already. Repetition is the critic's only reliable tool, and I wield it without apology, because the alternative is silence, and silence does not fill a column. The film does not fill a column either. It fills a screen, briefly, and then it does not. That is the review. We are done here. Truly. The matter is closed, the file is shut, and the next title waits in the queue with the patience of a thing that knows it will be judged, as all things are, and found, as most things are, wanting in ways both small and familiar. We proceed.