Julia’s Eyes.

After a strange premonition Julia and her husband Isaac decide to visit Julia’s twin sister Sarah, they discover she has committed suicide. The police think she killed herself because an operation to reverse her blindness that had gone wrong. What makes the death of Sara that much harder to take is that Julia suffers from the same degenerative eye disease. Subsequently she also does not believe that her sister committed suicide, suspecting foul play, she sets about investigating the death. This is the rather promising basis for Julia’s Eyes (2010) a Spanish horror-thriller written and directed by Guillem Morales, his second feature film following the critically acclaimed 2004 film The Uninvited Guest. The story is witnessed through Julia’s gradually deteriorating eyesight cleverly replicated by the cinematographer’s skillful lighting techniques, including one great scene that is lit only by an old fashioned flashgun!

Julia looks into the death of her sister.

Morales direction is more than competent and the film is quite scary and actually makes you jump, but at times it’s all a little implausible and unconvincing.

The soundtrack tends to be over the top and tries too hard to build a sense of unease, quite unnecessarily as the narrative is strong enough to do this without the loud bags and crashes from Fernando Velazquez music.  Produced by Guillermo del Toro and starring the attractive Spanish actress Belen Rueda, best known for her roles as Julia in The Sea Inside (2002) and as Laura in another production by del Toro, 2007’s The Orphanage. Rueda’s portrays both Julia and her twin sister Sara and certainly deserved her Nomination for Best Actress and along with the splendid cinematography does make this a worthy addition to an ever-improving Spanish horror genre.