For what it’s worth, Reininghaus is a very competent director with visual flourishes and grim depictions of torture that were both very unsettling and impossible to sit through. I found myself having to pause the film through most of the sequences as the cast just charges head first in to the horror that ensues with screaming and a vicious strangulation and raping. As for the cast, they’re very good with folks like Danielle Barker and Robert Nolan pulling in strong performances and convincing reactions to what should be a utterly horrifying little situation.
Speaking as a person afflicted with mental illness for most of my life, I didn’t quite appreciate the turn the film takes mid-way. What begins as a thriller that turns in to a revenge thriller suddenly pulls the carpet out from under us and completely dives head first in to utter camp and exploitation revealing the original intent which is to put on display a man in dire need of help reliant on medications. “Eyes Beyond” would be a much better film if it stuck to its original goal, which is clearly to be deemed as an exploitation horror thriller and nothing more. But for what it purports to do, it pretty much turns the plight of the mentally ill in to horror movie cannon fodder that borders on camp and pure exploitation and then takes a bit of a sanctimonious turn by advising us that mental illness puts people around us at risk as much as suicide does in the very end credits.
It’s an unfortunate and uncomfortable little subtitle that does not belong to a movie of this ilk. You don’t turn mental illness in to horror movie hokum and then put a PSA in the tail end trying to teach us a lesson. That’s akin to Hitchcock showing his audience “Psycho” and then in the very end when we learn the big twist we see a warning about the dangers of bipolar disorder and where to contact your local therapist. It just doesn’t belong. You either take mental illness seriously, or just flat out exploit it for entertainment purposes. You just can’t have it both ways. “Eyes Beyond” seems to want to work as both a public advisory and a horror film and doesn’t quite succeed in either counts. In either case, the primary character of the story Gabriel is such a loose cannon it’s impossible to understand where he’s coming from in the final scenes.
Is he on the verge of complete psychopathic breakdown, or is he just mentally ill and suffering from horrible mental diseases? And it’s never explained what type of disease he has or what affliction he’s suffering from so the ultimate scenarios staged are just exaggerated and ridiculous. As someone who has full on experience in such a sickness, that’s not how it goes. “Eyes Beyond” makes such a broad trite generalization of mental illness and then back strokes by insisting “Oh we know how horrible mental disease can be, so be careful, y’hear?” Uh–thanks for the warning. As stated above, you either dive head first in to shameless exploitation or proceed with a stern depiction of the horrors of mental illness.
On the outset I was very optimistic about the story which then took a turn for the worse and then introduced a third plot twist that threw me for a loop (I literally muttered to myself: “Ooh! Nice!”). But then director Reininghaus completely undermines his potential with an final scene that’s both tacked on, awkward, stereotypical, and distasteful as someone with experience in such a mental disability. While the direction is sharp and the performances disturbing, “Eyes Beyond” is a pretty distasteful and contradictory bit of sanctimonious mumbo jumbo that drops us in to the middle of a chaotic and violent situation and backs off with a melodramatic surprise twist that’s just sloppy and a tad offensive. You either go for the gut or don’t go for it at all.