MovieBabe Blog

By Tricia Olszewski 

Close Your Eyes is a straight-up horror flick features a Poltergeist-ian little blond girl who spends most of the movie mute or in a trance—a scary-as-shit sight whose effectiveness decreases as the stupidity of the adults around her skyrockets.

ER’s Goran Visnjic stars as Michael Strother, a hypnotherapist who has recently moved his family from America to England and opened a practice devoted to helping smokers quit. The good doctor, it seems, can not only rid people of unwanted behaviors, but also occasionally catch glimpses into his patients’ minds—which is what happens when he treats police investigator Janet Losey (Shirley Henderson). Near the end of Losey’s hypnotic trance—a very cool, partly animated sequence in which a Crayola-colored background of a sunny field and burbling brook turns sinister and ashy at the drag of her cigarette—the Silent One, Heather (Sophie Stuckey), appears in a vision.

Strother, master of discretion that he’ll prove himself to be, mentions the little girl—whoops!—as he’s ushering Losey out the door. Losey soon returns to insist that he help her on a case: She’s been assigned to protect Heather, who recently escaped from a serial killer and now refuses to talk. After some hesitation, Strother agrees and becomes consumed with the case—though not so much that he’ll share what he’s doing with his way-pregnant wife, Clara (Miranda Otto).

Director Nick Willing, who most recently helmed the TV movies Jason and the Argonauts and Alice in Wonderland, sets up the story, based on the Madison Smartt Bell novel Doctor Sleep, with surprising restraint. Strother becomes privy to mere snippets of the evil experiences lurking in Heather’s head, which are revealed in typical cheap-scare fashion but infrequent enough not to annoy. A re-creation of Heather’s kidnapping is also accomplished with eerie grace, cutting back and forth between Heather’s semiconscious re-enactment of her activities that day and the actual event, which is recounted only as far as the image of a shadowy figure behind her home’s frosted-glass door.

But the early chill of Close Your Eyes dissipates as its story becomes more involved—and more absurd. Heather’s kidnapper, who is suspected of having killed other children by injecting them with blood of an incompatible type, is thought to be involved in an ancient religious ritual involving—right—the transfer of consciousnesses between humans. (The laughable comparison that’s made is to tech nerds’ attempts to “transfer their souls into computers.”) This information is pieced together by full-of-trivia model-shop owner Elliot (Paddy Considine), who, though he’s the only weird guy here besides the actual killer, proves that it takes just a touch of overfreakiness to turn a horror film to cheese.

Visnjic and Henderson are worthy enough leads, and though Strother isn’t given much in the way of personality besides a history of insomnia and the requisite dark secret, Losey is a vivid tangle of nervous tics and visible frustration. The pair’s performances can’t hold together a script that collapses under its own ridiculousness, however. Each development is increasingly unbelievable, including a revelation that results after tea is spilled on a map, a child picking up the phone and serving as the killer’s personal 411, and jaw-droppingly dumb behavior by nearly all involved in the case.