ichael Strother (Visnjic) is a doctor with a profound and dangerous gift: He can see inside his patients' minds. While this certainly helps his burgeoning practice as a hypnotherapist, it produces side effects—such as insomnia and nightmarish visions—that plague him long after his clients have left his office.
When a police detective named Janet Losey (Henderson) discovers his gift, however, Strother discovers an opportunity to exorcise his past demons and regain a life of stability and comfort with his wife, Clara (Otto), and young daughter. Losey's latest assignment is to provide protection for Heather (Sophie Stuckey), a young girl who escaped the clutches of a deranged serial killer. She is the first victim to turn up alive, and Strother's unique ability enables Losey to leap inside her mind and uncover clues that may lead to the killer's arrest.
Strother, however, finds himself being drawn further and further into the insular world of the mind, and struggles to maintain a grip on his own sanity as he fights to restore Heather's. As he delves more deeply into the case, his family inadvertently becomes a potential target for abduction, and Strother races to reveal the killer's identity before his wife and child fall victim to his twisted, arcane rituals.
A narrative that's far from hypnotic
Close Your Eyes was initially titled Hypnotic, and the switch does an injustice to the film's meditative tone; as the picture opens, Goran Visnjic's baritone lulls the audience into a state of calm that few psychological thrillers ever achieve, much less right off the bat. Unfortunately, it's an atmosphere that the film fails to sustain. Instead, director Nick Willing veers away from his promising beginnings and crafts another in the seemingly indefatigable series of hackneyed, formulaic serial-killer tomes that arrive in theaters almost as quickly as the last of their smoldering brethren has disappeared from view.
Following in the estimable footsteps of such genre benchmarks as Se7en, The Sixth Sense and The Cell, and bearing the pedigree of an industry outsider presumably not ensconced in the muck of Hollywood convention, Close Your Eyes suggests the imminent possibility of a sleeper hit, a preferable alternative to the genre tripe currently lousing up multiplexes nationwide. It's well executed, with captivating cinematography and laudable acting courtesy Visnjic and Henderson, but its heart beats for the familiar rhythms of fake scares and forced perspective, strategic bulb blowouts and wince-inducing visuals. At the same time, it obeys the whim of genre formula with such overriding fealty and places its heroes in perilous scenarios that are so manufactured that the dominating sound as the film grinds toward its conclusion is the collective rolling of the audience's eyes.
Some of the scenes, such as the killer's surgical insertion of a rat into the body of one of his victims, feel purely like sensationalistic gore (especially if one has read Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho), but others simply utilize the same irritating tricks as thrillers past, like lurkers who spring at an opportune moment but could not possibly have hidden themselves prior to the reveal, or point-of-view shots of needles that serve no purpose but to discomfit the audience. What these contrived sequences inadvertently do is release the audience from the grip of suspense the narrative attempts to cast, narrow their focus on one lone incident and infuriate those who expect more from their movies than a consecutive string of uncomfortable moments that lead up to an equally improbable conclusion. Close Your Eyes fails not because it employs so many familiar ideas, but because it presents them as new and fresh; it's an irony that a movie that deals with the inner workings of the mind could ultimately be so bereft of imagination.
