There are horror films that leave you scratching your head because they’re deliberately mysterious, cleverly constructed or full of unexpected twists. And then there are films that leave you scratching your head because absolutely nothing seems to make a great deal of sense. Combine that with poor acting and illogical character behaviour, and you are left with a bit of a mess, frankly.
Unfortunately, One Eye Open falls firmly into the latter category.
The film opens with a young woman, Samantha, fleeing a large house, jumping into her car and frantically calling the police. She reports that an intruder has broken into her home and that she believes her friend may have been killed. It’s a reasonably effective set-up for a home-invasion thriller, and we hope for a film that at least promises some tension.
We then move back to earlier events and see Samantha, a young woman living in an impressively large and grand house with what appears to be a rather unsettling family history. A wardrobe door mysteriously opens, prompting a childhood memory involving her grandfather and the suggestion that something frightening may have been lurking inside.
Samantha subsequently visits her grandfather, who suffers from dementia and resides in a care home. We also learn that her grandmother has passed away. So far, there’s the foundation for a potentially interesting supernatural mystery.
Unfortunately, what follows is an increasingly bewildering collection of events that seem to operate without much regard for logic, believable character behaviour or, for that matter, effective storytelling.
After an evening out, Samantha returns home in a taxi, whose driver behaves rather suspiciously. Before long, we’re introduced to a masked intruder, a pizza delivery woman, some decidedly peculiar appearances by Samantha’s ghostly grandparents and a succession of events that had me repeatedly wondering whether I’d missed something important.
I hadn’t. At least, I don’t think I had. And I would go so far as to say that by the time I was thinking along these lines, I was starting to care less and less about whether I had or not!
One of the film’s biggest problems is its inability to establish a convincing sense of what is actually happening. Characters appear and disappear, apparently deceased people turn up in unexpected places, and scenes unfold without sufficient context to make them particularly engaging, much less frightening in any way.
Now, I have no objection to supernatural horror bending the rules of reality. That’s rather the point of the genre. But even a ghost story needs some degree of internal logic, particularly when it comes to how its living characters respond to extraordinary circumstances.
And that’s where One Eye Open becomes almost unintentionally comical.
Samantha encounters masked intruders, discovers what appear to be dead bodies and experiences all manner of inexplicable occurrences. Yet her reactions frequently seem remarkably casual, while the decisions made by her and those around her become increasingly difficult to believe, resulting in a lot of head-shaking and frowning from moi!
The police don’t fare much better. Their involvement produces some particularly baffling developments, including an apparent lack of concern over circumstances that surely ought to prompt a rather more thorough investigation.
There were moments when I genuinely wanted to shout at the screen, and not because I was remotely tense or frightened, but because I couldn’t understand why anyone was behaving the way they were, therefore questioning the directing and writing of what I was watching.
Unfortunately, the performances do little to rescue proceedings.
The acting is generally poor, with several scenes undermined by awkward delivery and dialogue that rarely sounds like a natural conversation. Even when characters are supposedly terrified, distressed or facing imminent danger, there’s often precious little conviction in their reactions.
This makes it extremely difficult to care about what happens to them.
The film also struggles where a horror production really needs to succeed: creating atmosphere, tension and scares.
Ghostly figures make appearances, characters creep around darkened rooms and the story repeatedly attempts to generate suspense. But very little of it works. The supernatural effects are underwhelming, and the scares rarely amount to anything more than another apparition appearing at a convenient moment and producing yet more head-shaking from me.
To give the film some credit, the large house provides a reasonably suitable setting for this sort of story, with plenty of rooms, corridors and shadowy corners in which unpleasant things might be lurking. The camerawork is also perfectly serviceable.
But those are modest positives in a production where so much else falls short.
As the film progresses, additional revelations concerning Samantha’s family history attempt to provide some explanation for the supernatural activity. Unfortunately, rather than bringing the story together in a satisfying fashion, these developments only add to the sense that the filmmakers are struggling to make their ideas work.
By the time we reach the final act, with further confrontations, increasingly improbable behaviour and an attempt at an emotional resolution, I had long since stopped feeling any genuine suspense.
Instead, I found myself watching in disbelief at just how poorly some of these sequences were being executed.
And that’s a shame, because the basic premise of a young woman discovering that her family home harbours a supernatural presence, while simultaneously facing a very real threat from intruders, isn’t without potential.
But potential means very little when the resulting film is so unconvincing.
One Eye Open is a muddled, poorly acted and frequently unintentionally amusing supernatural horror film that fails to deliver either convincing drama or effective scares. Its reasonably suitable location and adequate camerawork are nowhere near enough to compensate for the shortcomings elsewhere.
I spent much of the running time wondering what on earth was going on and whether anyone involved in the production had any idea what they were hoping to achieve with this movie overall. By the end, I was simply relieved that it was over.
