According to the introduction that ran ahead of the digital FrightFest screening, Blind took only five weeks to be made, and came from a dream. Having now seen Blind, the short turnaround is clear and the film is in dire need of a rewrite, or twenty. What happens in the ninety minute runtime can only be described as what would happen if Tommy Wiseau made a horror film.
An actress with a promising career, Faye (Sarah French), is rendered blind after a botched laser-eye surgery. Struggling to come to terms with the incident, she spends some of her time surrounded by friends from a support group. There’s her new BFF Sophia (Caroline Williams) whom is also blind, and burgeoning love interest, Luke (Tyler Gallant), a mute whom communicates only through his phone. Mostly though, Faye likes to wander aimlessly around her Hollywood Hills home. What she doesn’t realise however, is that she’s become a source of fixation for a peculiar man in a mask, one who will kill be close to her.
As valiant a job as Sarah French does as Faye, it’s quite plain for most of the run-time that she is a sighted actress. As only one scene takes place prior to her blindness, it makes no sense for a sighted actress to play the role. The film would potentially be more compelling were we watching someone that cannot see…it would at least have added a modicum of credibility to the movie. The dialogue is terrible, with Faye repeatedly spouting huge monologues that excessively explain her condition and her sorrow. As the film progresses, the monologues increase in length until, by the climax, she’s nattering non-stop. How the killer isn’t bored to death, I’ll never know.
In addition to the constant exposition, there are a ton of musical interludes. These interludes all play out the same: Faye puts on some music and our masked creep appears and floats around her. How she doesn’t hear, smell, or even sense his presence by any other means, beggars belief; given the frequency in which this occurs, it starts to get repetitive and laughable. Worse still, the songs are horribly on the nose with titles including ‘love is blind’, can’t be with you’ and ‘secret love’. The lyrics are even less subtle, which makes everything happening feel silly. Including so many songs drags out what is already a sedentary pace even longer than it really needs to be. Granted, a couple of them are pretty catchy, but I’d much rather a zippy-paced and coherent plot, than five minutes of watching a woman sway side-to-side.
The (only) saving grace of Blind is that it has some good cinematography. It feels odd to say, but Blind is an oddly visual film. The first part of the film is bright, sunny, and warm. This transitions as night falls, when the murders begin, into cool blues and icy whites. Our killer’s lair is pretty fancy too, all decked out in Christmas lights that add a much needed pop of colour. That’s about as inventive as he gets though, as for a masked killer, he is very vapid. He makes the killer from Valentine look as charismatic as Freddy Krueger. There’s no explanation for his actions, or why Faye is his chosen beloved, which when combined with the other failed elements of the film, feels like a complete waste of time.
The most frightening aspect of Blind comes right at the end of the credits where it is revealed that the true title of the film is Blind: Part 1; we shudder to imagine where part 2 might go.
Blind was reviewed at Arrow Video FrightFest 2020.
Blind
Summary
The Room of horror films, Blind is a muddled disaster that might look pretty, but is an overlong, vapid, and nonsensical mess.
