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‘Evil Eye’ Review: Blumhouse’s Reincarnation Thriller Is More Serious Than Scary
Any story can be a horror story with just the right twist. Such is the apparent thrust of filmmaking brothers Elan Dassani and Rajeev Dassani’s “Evil Eye,” which attempts to turn the cleverly conceived Audible Original penned by award-winning playwright Madhuri Shekar into a more run-of-the-mill chiller. Shekar, who also wrote the screenplay for this latest entry into Blumhouse and Amazon’s burgeoning streaming film series, first presented the story of mother-daughter Usha and Pallavi through a series of phone calls and voicemails, all the better to build on their bond and then explode it outward into something very different. That idea doesn’t quite work in the cinematic adaptation, which tries to inject the story’s supernatural element too early — all the better to set up the film as a thriller worthy of the Blumhouse label — and robs it of the source material’s cleverness in the process.
It’s a strange pickle, to be sure. The film’s greatest strength — that it tackles a culturally specific storyline with care and respect, never falling into cheap tropes — is also what keeps it from being genuinely scary. Usha (Sarita Choudhury) is a traditional Indian mother who believes in everything from reincarnation and birth charts to matchmaking and lifelong curses, the kind of stuff another story (and other creators) might treat as a simple way to deliver out-there scares. But Usha’s concerns are presented as rooted in very real occurrences from the start, removing any sense of doubt that could otherwise add true tension to the narrative.
Usha has spent most of her adult life worried about her only daughter, Pallavi (“GLOW” star Sunita Mani gamely taking on a non-comedic role), and her concerns only grow as Pallavi approaches age 30 with little in the way of romantic possibility. Pallavi may still live in the U.S. — Usha and her husband moved back to India once their only child was grown — but mother and daughter stay linked through copious phone calls, so it’s easy for Usha to fixate on her worries about Pallavi, always a click of a button away.
