A perfunctory thriller based on the familiar notion that seeing is not necessarily believing, BLINK features Madeleine Stowe as a blind woman whose sight is surgically restored.
Violinist Emma Brody, blinded as a child when her mother attacked her, gets a new pair of corneas, courtesy of an organ donor and Dr. Ryan Pierce (Peter Friedman). Her sight is at first cloudy, and she suffers from "retroactive hallucinations," a clinically documented syndrome in which the newly
sighted sometimes "see" things hours, or even days, after they actually occur. When her upstairs neighbor, a young woman, is murdered, Emma glimpses the killer's face; her mind, however, does not register the image until the following day. She tries to report the crime to Detective John Hallstrom
(Aidan Quinn), who has been investigating a string of local murders. Initially skeptical, Hallstrom comes to believe Emma after the body is found. His colleagues are doubtful: not only is Emma's vision flawed, but Hallstrom appears infatuated with his beautiful witness and may be blinded to
reality.
When the killer begins to stalk Emma, Hallstrom has her placed under police protection and the two soon become lovers. Before long, a link between the murders is revealed: each victim received transplanted organs from the same young woman. The murderer turns out to be a hospital orderly who
loved the organ donor. He traps Emma in an empty garage and attempts to kill her; sightless in the dark garage, she nevertheless manages to shoot him dead.
Yet another self-conscious elaboration of the relationship between Freudian scopophilia and the visual conventions of cinema--a vein thoroughly mined by Hitchcock, Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM, and a host of Hollywood imitations--BLINK has nothing new to offer either from a psychoanalytic
viewpoint or as entertainment. As a thriller, it's utterly predictable from scene to scene; as a character study, it's out of balance. Emma, ably played by Stowe, gets all the good lines and is so much the focal point during the film's first half that the other characters, notably Hallstrom, are
relegated to virtual second-banana status, and seem two-dimensional in comparison.
The careful development of Emma's character is nevertheless BLINK's only strong point, but it works at the expense of the film's execution: as screen time runs out, plot points are pushed abruptly and unconvincingly towards a summary and dissatisfying resolution. Elements of suspense seem to
have been constructed more in the editing room than by Michael Apted's pedestrian direction. Scenes between Emma and Hallstrom feel gratuitous; the fancy special effects that render Emma's hazy POV (supplied by cinematographer Dante Spinotti and f/x wizard Art Durinski) are unspectacular.
(Violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity.) leave a comment