Yellow Eyes Review: A Better Cast Than the Movie Around Them

Fifteen minutes into Yellow Eyes I started keeping a list.

A young married couple inherits a decaying house from an uncle they apparently barely knew. Somewhere in that house is a door with an eyeball painted over it. The husband begins dismissing his wife’s concerns almost the moment she has any. Something old is in the walls and it would like a body.

None of that is a slow build. That is a movie moving through a checklist at a jog, and it gets through most of the list before the first act is over. By the time Jesse Korman’s debut arrives at the idea it actually wants to explore, it has already spent the goodwill that comes from not knowing where a horror movie is headed.

The couple is the good part

Here is the frustrating thing. The performances are good.

Michael Kunicki and Nena Martins are good together. As Brad and Julia they have real chemistry and enough specificity in their line readings to suggest two people with a history rather than a pair of horror-movie positions labeled Husband and Wife. There are stretches early on where you can feel a different film pressing against this one, the kind where a marriage is the actual subject and the demon is only what forces the conversation.

That version keeps almost happening. Then something rattles and the movie remembers its obligations.

Possession by numbers

Once the idol starts working on Brad, Yellow Eyes commits to the shape audiences already know. He changes. She notices. He denies it. The eyes go yellow, black oil turns up, and the distance between them widens on schedule.

The individual beats are executed competently, and at this scale that is not nothing. The problem is that competence is all they are. A possession story lives on the specific texture of what the entity wants and how it gets there, and Mickey Solis’s screenplay keeps reaching for the general version. An ancient force that feeds on humanity’s darkest desires is a premise with a lot of room in it. The movie treats it as a reason for a man to become frightening rather than a reason to find out what this particular man wanted before anything got hold of him.

The eyeball door is a good image. So is an idol sealed inside a wall by a relative nobody in the family understood. Both are set up early and both mostly function as signposts.

The production story

According to Big Picture Media, Jesse Korman shot the film in 12 days on an approximately $150,000 budget. This is his feature directorial debut, produced by Joe Swanberg and Ben Gojer. Korman is also the vocalist for The Number Twelve Looks Like You, which is worth knowing when you are considering where a person learns to build and release tension.

On a craft level the money is on screen. The house reads as a real location with real decay. The performances are directed rather than merely captured. Nothing about Yellow Eyes looks like a filmmaker in over his head, which is the more common outcome for a first feature at this scale.

But a schedule is not an argument. A 12-day shoot explains why some things are simple. It does not explain why the story goes exactly where you expect it to go. Structure is the cheapest thing in a movie to make surprising and the one thing that costs nothing but nerve.

Verdict

Yellow Eyes, which began streaming on Screambox on August 18, is an accomplished low-budget debut with a cast capable of selling its supernatural melodrama. Its eagerness to embrace familiar possession-movie conventions is what keeps it from developing an identity of its own.

I would watch whatever Jesse Korman does next. I would just like him to make me wait a little longer before I know how it ends.