The Thousands

When a blind woman is found hanged, her twin sister Julia (Belén Rueda) is convinced it wasn’t suicide. Julia has the same degenerative eye condition as her sister, and her failing sight parallels her increasingly desperate hunt for the shadowy killer.

Director and co-writer Guillem Morales has fun literalising the fear that arises when a malign presence is felt, but remains tantalisingly unseen. Julia’s Eyes gets off to a spooky start alluding to an “invisible man”, but its scares are physical, not supernatural. Through canny use of light, framing and camera angles the tension remains taut, but by its final act the plot is groping its way as blindly as Julia, accumulating enough twists to supply several M Night Shyamalan movies.

Rueda is compelling as a vulnerable yet tenacious heroine who struggles to find sympathetic ears for her paranoia, but other characters’ motivations range from opaque to downright preposterous. Unlike The Orphanage, which also starred Rueda, Julia’s Eyes is shallow and unconvincing when it resorts to sentiment. Its slasher-flick climax might generously be called a Dario Argento homage, but for me it seemed much more generic, and a poor payoff on a genuinely intriguing premise.