Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Evil Eye’ on Amazon Prime, a Blumhouse Melodrama That Might Eventually Get Scary

Evil Eye is No. 3 in Amazon Prime’s Welcome to the Blumhouse hit-and-miss collection of spooky-season movies, which launched last week with The Lie (stream it!) and Black Box (skip it!). This one is based on Madhuri Shekar’s “Audible original” about emotional trauma, arranged marriage and a seriously powerful case of trans-Pacific mom-radar. Now let’s see if it’s worth putting our regular, non-evil eyes on it.

EVIL EYE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Pallavi (Sunita Mani) is 29 and unmarried, and the world has not stopped turning. This is true, in spite of her mother Usha’s (Sarita Choudhury)… concerns? Meddling? Dogged adherence to the Indian cultural norms that Pallavi finds wearisome? Usha and Krishnan (Bernard White) raised Pallavi in America before moving back to Delhi, and now their daughter lives a relatively free-spirited life in New Orleans. But all this doesn’t stop Usha from arranging dates for Pallavi, the 8,000 miles between them be damned.

But Pallavi loves her mother, and they talk on the phone every day. So she goes through with the dates with Indian men Usha sets up for her, to keep Mom happy and maybe one of them is cute? The latest guy is an hour late, and there just so happens to be a gorgeous hunk of man sitting alone in the same coffeehouse. He’s Sandeep (Omar Maskati), and he just knows she’s been set up on a date. He’s been there. And he’s charming and sensitive and successful and rich and Indian. It’s as if he fell from the stars. He is kismet in a cashmere sweater.

Speaking of the stars. Did I mention Usha is deeply superstitious and has an astrologist who makes house calls? She also routinely reminds Pallavi to wear her “evil eye” bracelet to ward off bad… things? Men? Demogorgonical anti-creations from the bowelpits of Heck? Who knows! Anyway, Pallavi tells Usha about this wonderful man she met, and you’d expect her to be overjoyed, but she’s been having little snatches of flashbacks, or maybe visions, and at first they’re kind of abstract, but don’t worry, they come into focus soon. Sandeep’s mere existence doesn’t sit well with Usha, and there are a few somethings about him that align with a distressing occurrence from her past. But these are just coincidences, and her hysterical adherence to star charts and mystical whatnot means she needs to see a damn doctor, right? And why is the film not really developing Sandeep as a character, beyond being Too Good To Be True? Maybe it has something to do with it being a Blumhouse movie released during October.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If you want a better story about the push and pull between Eastern and Western cultural sensibilities, go watch The Farewell.

Performance Worth Watching: Many know Mani from GLOW, and I know her from those silly insurance commercials; she’s good here, co-anchoring the film with an equally strong Choudhury.

Memorable Dialogue: Will Usha’s apparently out-of-character exclamation of “When your commander says drop to the ground, you drop to the ground!” ever be used in a practical context? I’ll never say!

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Good horror films take the time to develop characters before threatening their lives with psycho stalkers or creatures from the black lagoon or physical manifestations of existential dread — all the better to establish some emotional dramatic stakes. Evil Eye does that reasonably well, and the majority of the first two acts explore Pallavi’s torn-between-two-cultures dilemma and her close, complicated relationship with her mother. It does it so well, sometimes we wonder if it’s lulling us into complacency with all this normie family/relationship drama before walloping the crud out of us with some hardcore crazy third-act supernatural hoodoo NO SPOILERS!!!

Ahem. I’ll hold the central mystery in its sacred place and just say the overly melodramatic way the story concludes might not be particularly satisfying for many viewers, despite its slightly Hitchcockian flourishes. Otherwise, it’s blandly directed, pragmatic and dull like a made-for-TV movie from the pre-widescreen era. Evil Eye deserves some credit for being About Something, thanks to its employment of a compelling cycle-of-abuse metaphor within a specifically non-Western cultural context (and kudos to Blumhouse for striving towards greater representation in its films). Then again, are there any stories about Indian-Americans that don’t involve arranged marriage, stereotypical supernaturalism or ideological generational clashes? Yes? Can we get some more of those please?

Our Call: SKIP IT. Evil Eye is ultimately too middle-of-the-road to recommend. The text is rote; same goes for the subtext.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Evil Eye on Amazon Prime