After watching the trailer for this apparently standard
whodunnit thriller/romance, or rather, romance/thriller, i
was to expect the worst. Although initially an interesting
premise, and Madeline Stowe - who is an exceptional
actress - in the cast, i prepared myself for the
usual, "girl is handicapped, witnesses a murder, now the
murderer is after her. Enters boy. Boy protects girl.
Together they catch the criminal, and they all live happily
ever after."

I wasn't too far wrong with that assumption, but I have to
say, this film proved to be a pleasant surprise. Let's
begin with the characters. As i imagined, Madeline Stowe
was perfectly cast as Emma Brody, the girl who was blinded
at the age of eight by her abusive mother who smashed her
face into a mirror. It is twenty years later and
surprisingly, the damsel is not the distressed victim, but
a strong, independent woman who plays the violin in an
Irish folk band, and her vulnerability is only portrayed
rather ironically after she regaines her sight early in the
film by undergoing a cornea transplant. What is not
entirely clear is why the doctors waited twenty years
before the surgery could be performed. Emma's
explaination, "Doctors and my mother told me my retinas
were screwed," was not quite faesable, and her mother would
have been arrested for her crime, no? But I digress. In
the very first scene of the film, we are introduced to the
lead male character, a detective played by Aiden Quinn, who
is initially portrayed as a chauvenistic, beer drinking,
loudmouthed, arrogant cop. This is all a pretty accurate
description, and I must confess I was disappointed with the
choice in the casting of this character at first. But when
we next see him in the police station when Emma arrives to
report a crime she may or may not have witnessed, it is
clear that there is more to him than meets the eye. His
sexual charisma and chemistry with Stowe literally radiates
off the screen when the banter begins, and therein lies the
beginning of a beautiful love-hate relationship between the
two characters.

The detective is obviously a sceptic, and at first refuses
to believe the claims of this feisty recently blind woman
whose eyesight is blurry at best, especially when he
discovers she had been drinking when she heard suspiscious
noises, and perhaps saw the criminal on the stairs in her
apartment. But Emma halucinates, and she is not sure
herself of what she saw. As her sight has only recently
been restored, her brain is registering the visions she
sees hours, even days after her eyes have seen them. So
she believes she saw a man clearly the morning after he was
in her building the night before.

Behold, two days later the body of a dead woman is found in
the apartment above, and the detective has to eat humble
pie as he begins questioning Emma about what she saw.

The plot thickens, and the audience begins to see that this
film is not the simple cop thriller we have seen so many
times before. Of course there are elements of your
standard whodunnit. The detective being the only one to
believe the girl's story, and he finds his growing feelings
for her getting in the way of his job in finding this now
serial killer. And of course there's the old climax where
the girl naively gets drawn into the killer's trap. But
even these scenes were handled well, and held together by
very good supporting cast. There are a few scenes which
border on corny, like when the two leads finally consummate
their feelings for eachother. With different actors, they
may not have worked, but Stowe and Quinn somehow made
their relationship realistic, and you can see that the
characters care about eachother though they are sometimes
cruel. In one scene the detective ridicules her feelings
for him, knowing her weakness, "You want me to say I love
you?" At it is clear he is deliberately pushing her away so
he can protect her from the killer.

Despite there being more than a few holes in this
complicated plot, and the fact that an hour into the film
the writers seem to forget about the thriller element of
the film as the central relationship developes, it was a
good two hours spent. W