Julia's Eyes

This is an extract from the full review we ran for the theatrical release of the film.

Astronomer Julia (Belén Rueda) senses that something is wrong with her twin sister Sara and drives with husband (Lluís Homar) to her house to discover an apparent suicide. Both sisters suffer from a degenerative disease that leads inevitably to blindness, and everyone apart from Julia believes Sara’s more advanced condition caused her to take her life. So Julia begins her own investigation, against the wishes of her husband, seeking out a man her sister was with but whom no one seems to have seen, every step she takes bringing on the stress-induced episodes that reduce her vision more and more…

Julia’s Eyes is fantastically entertaining for about three quarters of its running time and slightly disappointing thereafter. It’s still pretty scary, but never steps outside the confines of what you’d expect from this kind of thing. The splendid sense of menace built up around the shadowy killer is dissipated as their actual nature is revealed, and the last 20 minutes is unnecessarily cluttered with red herrings and dead ends. And don’t get me started on that final bloody scene… Still, it has all the qualities you’d expect from a Guillermo del Toro production, it looks and sounds great, Rueda plays Julia with the right mix of vulnerability and defiance, and there must be a fair few out there who’ll be just as swept up by the final reel as I was by the rattling nasty fun preceding it.

Mark Stafford