The Eye of the Beholder (1997) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Ashley Judd is a serial murderer. Ewan MacGregor is a surveillance agent, "The Eye", who sees her commit a murder while he is working on a case. Instead of turning her in, he starts to follow her full time. At first we wonder if he is a mere voyeur, but it is more than that. She meets a need in his life.

So he spends the entire film shadowing her through exotic and beautiful locales, removing the evidence whenever she commits a crime, causing a distraction or creating an escape route whenever the law's noose becomes too tight around her, protecting her when she is in other danger, and even killing two men, one of them an innocent and sympathetic character killed out of jealousy. Judd is not really aware of his presence, although she later acknowledges that she must have had a guardian angel.

This movie generated powerful extremes of opinion. IMDb viewers tended to rate it very high or very low. Those who hated it disparaged its incoherent structure, plot holes, and ambiguous ending.

In my mind, the biggest weakness of the film is that the characters are too aloof from our involvement. MacGregor is a hopeless dweeb to begin with, and we lose any empathy for him when his jealous gunshots cause the death of a blind man. Judd - well, she's cold, unapproachable, and a serial killer, so it's not like we're going to dig for her secret the way we would for Ilsa's in Casablanca. After all, Ilsa left our hero and made him bitter, but this lady would have killed him and gutted him like a deer. So we, the viewers, never get drawn into the story in the way we would if there were a sympathetic protagonist.

Those who loved it praised its sheer cinematic quality, its imagery, and its acting. In a sense, both points of view are justified. The director displays some dazzling visuals of spectacular locales, and continuously challenging minimalist explanation shots that force your mind into the fray. You know what I mean. Two feet are seen under a bench in a train station - between them appears a paper. You fill in the blanks. That sort of thing. That's a lot of style, but no substance. We just watch it as an intellectual film study exercise in style. Not everyone will enjoy that, because the movie experience is generally about the heart more than the mind.

I don't agree with the people who criticized the incoherence and plot holes. If it sometimes makes no sense, well, so be it because we see much of the movie through The Eye's P.O.V., and he's as mad as a hatter, so we're going to see a skewed view. I don't think you're supposed to think of it as a thriller, but as a bizarre Electra love story between a madman and a psychotic serial killer.

Although I was fascinated by it, I can't recommend it because most moviegoers hated it, and the vast majority of critics also despised it, so there are great odds against your liking it, no matter what I say. To be fair, It appears that it just struck some kind of chord with me, and is actually a poor movie. Perhaps this one is not a winner but, mark my words, director Stephen Elliott ("Priscilla, Queen of the Desert") will have a monster mainstream hit someday. He's only 36, and he has talent up the wazoo.

This a the second film made from Marc Rehm's 1980 novel, "The Eye of the Beholder." The first was a 1983 French film called Mortelle randonnée.