Writer/director Richard E. Williams swings for the fences with his latest feature, Dead Eyes. Out of FrightFest, the first-person POV film lies within the same ambitious realm as Johannes Grenzfurthner’s experimental Solvent. Where Grenzfurthner tinkers with broken static and sound, Williams delights with a slicker approach, with the feeling of a hyper-stylized video game. Dead Eyes dares to be big, bold, and brash with its scares. Williams finds sadistic pleasure in combing the genre for the wildest tricks he can reuse for his own sick game of cat-and-mouse. He pushes the envelope, veering gently into liminal horror territory before course-correcting back into traditional found footage.
Sean (Rijen Laine) heads out to the woods to find his missing father Paul (Stephen Phillips). His girlfriend Grace (Ana Thu Nguyen) and friend Eric (Charles Cottier), along with his girlfriend Kate (Alea O’Shea), join him on the recovery mission. It’ll also give Sean time to grieve his little sister Lilly (Mischa Heywood). The film opens when Sean awakens after being knocked out. Neither he nor the audience knows what happened to him, tightening the bizarre and unsettling feel that’s settled on the trees. Grace finds and consoles him, slowly guiding him back to the group. The camping spot could not be more luxurious, with Eric having assembled a family-sized tent for Sean and Grace.
Whatever latched onto Sean torments him through disembodied voices echoing through the forest. When night falls, an eerie, breathing fog seeps along tree trunks and maroons the group in one spot. The darkness takes on an existence of its own, luring Sean deeper into the woods until he discovers an abandoned shed. Within its crumbling walls lies the darkest of all secrets and a diabolical, life-altering scheme. Williams fully immerses you in the atmospheric surroundings. When Sean decides to do a “hero dose” of shrooms, he tumbles into a wicked, mind-melting wonderland that’ll make the viewer sick to their stomach. The director breaks the rules and envelops the audience with what Sean sees and hears. He becomes the vehicle for the warped psychedelic trip that might shatter Sean’s brain if he lets it.
Dead Eyes adopts the RPG experience, carefully crafted sequences that feel like you’re refilling your inventory or searching for a medical kit. But that’s to its credit. Williams creates personal stakes for the audience through this artistic method. It becomes about your own survival as much as the characters’. In his desperation, Sean believes he sees his dead sister and follows the sweetly angelic sound of her voice. And what he discovers is far worse than anything he could have dreamed up. Once the film topples over, Williams conjures a host of fangy, blood-dripping, and mutilated monsters in the vein of Ricky Umberger’s The Fear Footage trilogy and Joseph and Vanessa Winter’s Deadstream.
Richard E. Williams fulfills found footage cravings with a masterfully peculiar production that feels quite in line with Robbie Banfitch’s The Outwaters. Aburd surrealism and horror expressionism come to skip in the silver moonlight, allowing Williams and the cast to unapologetically play like their lives depend on it. And maybe it does.
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