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Close Your Eyes

2002, Movie, R, 108 mins

Close Your Eyes: Review

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Before it goes down in a soggy mess of scary movie cliches and insultingly stupid plot contrivances, director and co-writer Nick Willing's adaptation of Madison Smartt Bell's novel Dr. Sleep gets in some good, seriously creepy licks. Fleeing personal and professional demons back in the U.S., high-strung hypnotherapist Michael Strother (Goran Visnjic) has relocated his pregnant wife (Miranda Otto) and their young daughter (Lauren Gabrielle Volpert) to London and established a lucrative but unlicensed practice, using guided imagery to help smokers kick the habit. One of his nicotine addicts, police detective Janet Losey (Shirley Henderson), recognizes his singular and troubling gift — he can enter his patients' deepest thoughts — and threatens to alert the tax authorities to his cash-only business unless he agrees to consult on a case that has the police stymied. A vicious and elusive serial child killer has struck repeatedly, tattooing his victims with occult symbols and murdering them with transfusions of mismatched blood. One little girl, Heather (Sophie Stuckey), escaped his clutches, but she's so traumatized she refuses to speak. Once Strother opens his mind to the terrors that lurk in Heather's consciousness, there's no retreat to safer psychic ground. He starts drifting into trance-like reveries during sessions with clients and becomes morbidly afraid of falling asleep. When he does sleep, he's tormented by vivid nightmares that jangle his nerves and put additional stress on his already strained marriage. Since he quite literally won't be able to rest until the case is solved, Strother throws himself into Losey's investigation. Together they enlist the aid of an occult buff (Paddy Considine) who suggests the case is somehow connected to 15th-century French alchemist Nicolas Flamel and his belief that consciousness could be transferred from one body to another. So far, so spooky. But then the story takes a seriously wrong turn that requires Strother to rush in where anyone — no matter how skittish or sleep-deprived — with a lick of common sense would fear to tread. Visnjic's somber charisma and Henderson's brittle wariness work surprisingly well together, and his haunted body language lends weight to the film's central twist on genre convention — it's Strother who takes the physical and psychological battering usually reserved for terrorized women. But in the end, the script undermines their best efforts, requiring them to behave so foolishly that it's hard not to lose all patience with them. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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