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Immediately following the scene with the dead paper boy comes the moment of the big reveal. Images fly by. Quick cuts of the family being tortured and killed. The paper boy's corpse being disposed of. Suddenly, Abigaile, looking vibrant, beautiful, and very much alive, stands in the doorway of the Morales' home, awaiting her boyfriend, Adam. Jimmy, who turns out to be her kid brother, is playing around the family SUV while Vivian and Henry wave from inside the vehicle. Gabriel, looking ashen and tortured, stares in disbelief as Adam moves past him, kissing Abigaile tenderly. He recognizes Gabriel's lost look and asks if he's taken his pills today. Barely able to shake his head, Gabriel wanders off. Moments later, he sits in his room alone, the voice of a woman (who sounds like Abigaile) taunts him, egging him on to end it all.
It all comes together like the end of an M. Night Shymalan movie, but rather than the "ah-ha" moment of The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable we're left with the "meh" of The Village or Lady in the Water. Since I didn't know Gabriel was the protagonist and that everything up to this point had happened in his tortured mind, it was impossible to feel complete sympathy for him. I was being asked to completely forget what I believed for the first 20-plus minutes of the movie.
Therefore, the ending feels disconnected from the rest of the movie. The real shame of it is, the sad, almost catatonic young man I saw in those final moments is a character deserving of sympathy. When he admits to his brother that he didn't take his medication, I assumed this is why he was having such vivid, horrifying hallucinations. Unfortunately, in "Eyes Beyond" I was only able to witness the horror of his mental illnesses on a superficial level. I think a much deeper, richer tale lurks beneath the surface of this one. A story about the day-to-day battle of maintaining balance in a world dominated by extreme highs and lows that would help us understand the horror of living with such nightmarish visions.
As a life-long horror movie fan, I’ve always preferred tales of terror that take place in locations that are familiar and safe. Places we often take for granted as having the potential to harbor true evil are also the most terrifying because they lull is into believing all is well. Think about the small town of Haddonfield in Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), or the rows of cookie-cutter suburban tract homes in Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), as a couple well-known examples. Such a nondescript, all-American neighborhood is the setting for “Eyes Beyond," whose brightly-lit interiors and daylight-filled exteriors belie the horrific goings on in the film. This technique could work to great effect to throw the audience off at the beginning, but the subtle use of light and shadow to foreshadow the ominous tone of what's to come would have helped. As it stands, the movie was very well lit. And while this is preferable to the muddy, noisy images of other low-budget productions, this movie was too well lit. The most obvious example of this occurs when Gabriel tells Vivian it's morning. He looks beyond the camera, presumably facing the sliding glass doors as sunlight fills the room. The key light used was too intense to be believable as early morning sunlight. It casts a hard shadow of Gabriel on the wall behind him, and the light's reflection is clearly visible in a window on the same wall.
There were a few excellent uses of light, however. The best was when Gabriel, after observing the Rogers family carrying Jimmy's body, closes the sliding glass door and ever-so-slightly backs into the house, a shadow slipping over his face like a veil. Additionally, the lighting and color during the ending, from the moment Gabriel is standing in the doorway until the final shot, had a cold, almost otherworldly tone and texture. I'm not sure if Magic Bullet or some other color-enhancing application was used, but I really liked the visual starkness that embodied Gabriel's real world.
The filmmakers used a RED camera to film "Eyes Beyond" and while this made for some excellent images it also created some issues, especially relating to focus and depth of field. There were several instances where elements of a shot were out of focus that shouldn't have been. For example, in the earlier dinner scene, there's a wide angle shot of everyone at the table except Gabriel. The background is slightly out of focus while everyone visible in the shot is in focus, everyone that is except Henry, who sits on the far left of the frame. Several objects in the foreground, like flowers and corn, are also out of focus, indicating that Henry was positioned too close to the foreground. Composing the shot with characters both in and out of focus when they should all be on the same focal plane creates confusion for the eye. By cheating him a little closer to Vivian, this issue could have been eliminated. Also, the flowers were centered in the frame they kept drawing the eye, thus distracting from the rest of the composition. This was especially true when a rack focus was used that brought the flowers into focus and then shifted back to the actors. Rack focus is a technique that should be used sparingly to emphasize something dramatic in a scene, not as a way to draw attention to each character as they speak.
Also, there's a tendency when using cameras, even one as powerful as the RED, for filmmakers to over use shallow depth of field. While it's true that decreasing the depth of field can make the image appear more cinematic, it can also become self-conscious and distracting if used in excess. This is what happened in "Eyes Beyond" where the majority of the shots had something, either in the foreground or background, out of focus.
The dialogue was clear throughout "Eyes Beyond." The biggest problem with the sound was that the background noise would sometimes shift when cutting from one shot to another. It sounded like the low roar of a highway or interstate nearby. This occurred inside as well, but wasn't as obvious. This shifting audio tone is usually indicative of using the on-camera microphone as it picks up all the surrounding sounds. However, the audio in “Eyes Beyond” was recorded using an external 702T 2-track Compact Flash Recorder and the Sennheiser ew112-P evolution wireless SK100 bodypack. In the future, I’d recommend using a directional, shotgun mic, keeping it as close to the actors as possible to isolate their dialogue. It's always a best practice to get ambient sound and room tone, which will help cover a multitude of audio sins in post.
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