Open Your Eyes: Review

11th June 2021

Jason Miller (Ry Barrett) is a screenwriter on a deadline. He’s writing a screenplay for a low budget horror movie with no stars in it, yet he’s got writer’s block. He’s also noticed a rather large crack running down the wall in his living room that’s leaking water. He knows it’s coming from the neighbours upstairs, but he’s having no luck with contacting them.

Then one day he meets Lisa, (Joanna Saul) and he finds that there’s an instant connection between them so he asks her to dinner so that they can get to know each other. However, during their date Jason starts to realise that everything is not as it seems. Particularly as the hallucinations he keeps having are getting stronger.

Open Your Eyes is a psychological horror/thriller written and directed by Greg A. Sager, unfortunately though despite the small cast and crew and how well the film is shot, Open Your Eyes is nothing new. There are many films about writers such as Misery, Secret Window and The Shining, the fact that they’re all based on stories by Stephen King is surely a coincidence.

However, it seems that Sager may have taken inspiration from King’s work and developed a concept along the same vein. The problem is that although the concept is solid, there’s very little else to it, so this slow burn thriller may feel very slow to most of the audience.

Most of us in the past year or so have found ourselves at times feeling alone because of the way the world has developed recently, but watching somebody seemingly purposefully isolated doesn’t necessarily make for a good watch.

Despite the occasional hallucination and jump scares, Open Your Eyes doesn’t have much originality and so when the big twist is revealed, the audience may feel like there could have been more.

Open Your Eyes feels like a movie that had a good concept, but there really wasn’t any way to pad out the script. So whereas it may be billed as a slow burn mystery thriller, the pacing of the film may put off people looking for an interesting movie.

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