Anguish

A film begins in a cinema. On the screen a man called John lives with his mother; she directs him under hypnosis and sends him out to collect people's eyes. The audience in the hall watches. Then it becomes clear that somebody in that audience is doing the same thing, and the film on the screen and the reality in the hall run into each other. Bigas Luna writes and directs. Zelda Rubinstein plays the mother and Michael Lerner plays John. The structure is a film inside a film. After a while the viewer loses track of which layer they are in, and the production builds that deliberately; there is even a warning title at the start. The hypnosis passages are visually foregrounded: spiralling patterns, a counting voice, and snails. Those scenes are designed to work on the audience as well. Bigas Luna later became known in Spanish cinema for films such as Jamón Jamón; this early work is entirely on the horror side and was shot in English. Zelda Rubinstein was known from Poltergeist and the part here uses that image directly. Its weakness is the third act; once the game of layers is established the film finds nothing new. Who it is for: viewers who like eighties horror and films that play formal games. Who it is not for: the eye scenes are very explicit, the narrative starts repeating, and the idea is stronger than the execution.