Well, I’ll be. Joss Whedon can suck, too. Go figure. Yeah, he didn’t direct this, but there’s nothing in this screenplay that will slay the critics of darkness. I’d never heard of this film, but on the strength of my new bestest favorite Zoe Kazan and traditional favorite Joss Whedon, I looked deeply In Your Eyes and questioned, “How bad could it be?”
I got my answer.
In snowy New England, an out-of-control sled collides with a tree and at that very moment, some kid keels over in a New Mexico classroom from a head injury. Ahhhhhh, Dylan (Michael Stahl-David) and Becky (Kazan) are mysteriously connected. Of course, they can’t be too connected, because the kid actors suck, so the script lets them be kinda connected until they become adults. That way, everybody can fast-forward to the part where backgrounds are well established. That’s what I’m guessing, at least. The real reason the screenplay skips twenty years ahead is now they’re both hot.
Dylan can’t not make the wrong move. Already an ex-con, he’s parlayed his mad auto mechanic skillz into a menial car washing job. His average night includes awkward small talk, an abetting request, and a pool cue facial. Becky, if anything, is even worse off. Although she doesn’t show it, she doesn’t much care for her dominating husband. He’s a doctor … or at least he played one on my TV. While Becky never went to prison, the idea that she’s currently in one is hardly lost on us. Luckily, the pool cue incident triggered anew the long lost connection between Dylan and Becky. And they both think they’re crazy.
There have got to be more things you can do with a cross country mental connection than save on phone bills and play footsie with your own foot, but these two never discover them. The heart of this picture involves
two people speaking aloud in public to (seemingly) nobody in particular. I find Dylan’s part in this especially frustrating. You live alone; you’re single; you’re an ex-con; you live in New Mexico and you can’t find five minutes of “me” time?! And why do they have to speak aloud in the first place? The connection is strong enough so that Dylan can experience every sense Becky has, but somehow mind reading is out-of-bounds, huh? Fine.
In Your Eyes is a frustrating experience. The idea of cross-world telepathy is hardly new and all the direction leads here not to enhanced realities, but to Dylan and Becky to alienating everyone else in their physical worlds. The fact that there’s even one scene in a mental hospital, much less an entire plot surrounding such, highlights the stupidity of the writing; this feels like a workshop in which somebody threw out the question, “What could happen to a person who talks to a ghost?” and the improv troupe went with exactly the first answer the audience shouted out. On the strength of Ruby Sparks, What If, and, most recently, The Big Sick, Zoe Kazan became one of my favorite romantic leads. A week from now, I’m going to pretend she wasn’t even in this film.
Two people come cosmically undone
With a connection that could lead to fun
A knowledge base new
Sharing the minds of two
Not sure this pair can handle one
Unrated, 106 Minutes
Director: Brin Hill
Writer: Joss Whedon
Genre: Take my life … please!
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: People who cannot accept Joss Whedon’s fallibility
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The reasonable
