The 2000s Movie Project: 'Eye of the Beholder'

Eye of the Beholder (2000)

Directed by Stephen Elliott

Written by Stephen Elliott

Starring Ewan McGregor, Ashley Judd, K.D Lang

Release Date January 28th, 2000

Eye of the Beholder is so much crazier than I ever imagined. This seemingly straightforward turn of the 21st century thriller starring Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd is utterly bats***. That’s really the only way to describe it. A vaguely defined secret agent turned creepy stalker falls in love with an insane woman after witnessing her murder two people. As an expression of his love he begins murdering people to protect her and that’s only half of the creeptastic narrative of Eye of the Beholder.

Ewan McGregor stars in Eye of the Beholder as Steven Wilson aka The Eye, aka The Angel. He’s also known as the single worst secret agent in history. Wilson works for some unnamed spy agency where he uses a gun he modified into a camera, and still a gun, to take pictures of creeps screwing their secretaries. I imagine there is more to his job than this but this is what we first see. The first mission of Wilson’s we see we think he’s going to assassinate some guy in the midst of having sex.

Then he pulls the trigger and we find out the gun is a camera for some reason. Wilson then hacks the database of the man he just photographed and places the photo of the man having sex with his mistress on all of the computers in what we can assume is the man’s office full of employees. Why a spy is playing pranks and modifying a gun into a camera is anyone’s guess. Cataloging the wildly unnecessary elements of Eye of the Beholder is a fool’s errand.

Ashley Judd co-stars in Eye of the Beholder as Joanna Eris, a black widow killer of sorts with severe daddy issues. Joanna meets men, starts relationships with them and then murders them in cold blood while crying about her daddy leaving. Yeah, that happens. Joanna sheds identities and wigs with cold blooded efficiency. She might make a fascinating subject of a movie except that Eye of the Beholder is not about Joanna but about the man who becomes infatuated with her, Steve the spy, who becomes her guardian angel/stalker.

Prodding Steven to follow and document Joanna’s life is Steven’s 8 year old daughter, Lucy, portrayed by twin sisters Anne-Marie and Kaitlin Brown. Okay, it’s actually Steven’s messed up vision of his daughter but nevertheless. It’s Steven’s vision of Lucy who tells dad “Don’t leave her daddy, she’s just a kid, she needs you.” This is in the immediate aftermath of Steven watching Joanne slit the throat of her latest lover, the man he was supposed to be keeping tabs on.

Rather than call the police or make any attempt to bring Joanna to justice via his own role as a member of law enforcement, Steven simply watches and then follows after Joanna without telling his superiors, including a colleague named Hilary (K.D Lang, giving the only good performance in the movie), what he’s doing. Despite being given a new assignment, Steven continues to follow Joanna, protecting her and creepily watching everything she does via spy cameras so terribly placed that it requires suspension of disbelief to buy that Joanna can’t see the cameras.

A baffling sequence finds Joanna taking a bath in her New York apartment home base and somehow, Steven has acquired the apartment next door. Seeing her enter her bathroom, which shares a wall with Steven’s bathroom, Steven proceeds to creepily run his hands over the shared wall as he dreams of Joanna on the other side. It takes a lot to make an actor as talented and interesting as Ewan McGregor into a creep and yet, Eye of the Beholder pulls it off with aplomb. I don’t think that was the intention of either McGregor or the movie, but nevertheless.

Truly, attempting to divine what anyone was thinking regarding the making of Eye of the Beholder is impossible. The characters are such bizarre, off-putting, creeps, murderers, and weirdos that trying to find an entry point as an audience member is impossible. We’re left to merely gawk at the movie as one severely awful decision follows another and the film accumulates a reverse sort of momentum not unlike a vehicle at high speed striking an immovable object in slow motion. It’s both hard to watch and impossible to look away from.

Does that mean I recommend Eye of the Beholder? Oh God, No! I’m merely relating my experience of this insane, unimaginably misguided movie. Writer-Director Stephan Elliott is a visionary of the utterly confounding. Elliott is an auteur of sleazy silliness and a man so lost in his own fetishized oddity that he can’t help express his weirdness on the big screen for the world to see and be horrified by.

Find my archive of more than 20 years and nearly 2000 movie reviews online at SeanattheMovies.blogspot.com. Follow me on Twitter at @PodcastSean and follow my archive blog on Twitter @SeanattheMovies. You can also hear me talk about movies on the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast.