The past isn’t something that can be outrun in Evil Eye, one of the most unusual horrors from Blumhouse yet. A romcom that mutates into a ghost story, told largely through two characters’ continent-crossing FaceTime calls, the film — from new anthology Welcome To The Blumhouse — deals with a mother who learns to be careful what you wish for. Usha (Sarita Choudhury), doting mother to Pallavi (Sunita Mani), wants nothing more than for her daughter to settle down. When a chance coffee-shop encounter with a charming man named Sandeep (Omar Maskati) leads to a whirlwind romance, Pallavi expects a joyous reaction. Instead, Usha starts talking about an ancient curse, and directors Elan and Rajeev Dassani begin teasing a dark experience in the matriarch's past that all of a sudden has come back to haunt her.
The film benefits from carefully-applied ambiguity: what’s real and what’s paranoia is often hard to untangle.
Usha becomes convinced that the man courting her daughter is the reincarnation of a former abusive partner — leading to question marks over her sanity, and strain on her relationship with Pallavi. It’s a bold premise, ambitiously delivered by the director duo, who pack their drama with colourful cinematography and intriguing subtext: centring the film on a mother and daughter separated by countries and cultures allows glimpses at the challenges facing diasporic families. The film also benefits from its carefully-applied ambiguity: what’s real and what’s paranoia is often hard to untangle, in a movie that confronts the ways that our traumas never leave us —especially the ones we try to bury.
It’s tonally uneven — the first portion of the film plays out as an extended meet-cute, as endearing aspiring writer Pallavi finally lucks out in love, or so she thinks — and there’s an inherent pulpiness to its plot, which some might find a tad too preposterous to go with. The film’s audiobook origins also limit the film somewhat, visually: the Dassanis struggle valiantly for ways to make endless video calls dramatically interesting, not always succeeding (brace yourself for lots of shots of people pacing in bedrooms). Get past that, though, and Evil Eye is a genre-jumping curio that’s entertaining in its originality.
