90 min | NR | October 13, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A mother becomes convinced that her daughter’s perfect new boyfriend is the reincarnation of the man who once tried to kill her. She might be paranoid. She might be right. The movie cannot decide which possibility is scarier, and that indecision is the whole problem.
Evil Eye is a supernatural thriller, the third entry in Amazon’s Welcome to the Blumhouse slate. Usha is a mother who watches over her grown daughter from across the world by phone. When Pallavi falls for a wealthy, attentive man, Usha becomes certain he is the reincarnation of an abuser from her own past. The film wants to be about how trauma passes from mother to daughter and how the line between superstition and genuine warning collapses. The premise is sharp. The execution reaches for a dread it never grips.
Sarita Choudhury plays Usha with a tightening grip on her own fear, and she does her best work over a phone line, reading menace into pauses her daughter cannot hear. Sunita Mani plays Pallavi as a daughter caught between love and obligation, indulging her mother and resenting her in the same breath. Bernard White plays Krishnan, Usha’s husband, as the household skeptic who keeps asking his wife to be reasonable. Omar Maskati plays Sandeep with a polish meant to register as menace, and it mostly registers as blank. The actors commit to the material. The script hands the supporting players almost nothing to play.
Elan and Rajeev Dassani direct from a script by Madhuri Shekar. The film lives inside cross-cut phone calls between two continents, and the directors stage the tension by intercutting one cramped, shadowed home with another that sits in open daylight. The contrast is the strongest formal idea in the movie. The cinematography stays flat everywhere else, and the score announces every scare before it arrives. A more frightening film would trust the silence on the line. This one underlines.
The core idea, that a mother’s protectiveness and a mother’s paranoia are impossible to tell apart, deserves a sharper film. Evil Eye builds its dread and then resolves it with literal supernatural machinery that drains the ambiguity out of the room. The interesting version never confirms whether Usha is haunted or simply correct. This version answers the question and loses its grip in the answering. The pieces are here. The movie that would have used them is not.