Home-invasion thriller See For Me is a waste of a good gimmick
Missed opportunities abound in this indie thriller from director Randall Okita
Film Reviews Thriller
The popular interpretation of home-invasion thrillers tells us that they are funhouses of our domestic fears, But a considerable part of their appeal, in many cases, comes down to real estate porn. A home-invasion movie, in its platonic form, is an invitation to snoop and ogle a huge, art-directed, sometimes scenically secluded house—it’s Architectural Digest with masked killers, house lust with a side of breaking and entering. We may be rooting for the protagonists as they squirm and sweat and sneak around in the shadows, but our role as viewers puts us closer to the intruders. A competent home-invasion thriller will allow us to case the location, learn the floor plan, familiarize ourselves with the security systems if there are any. A really good one will recognize that the first home invader is the camera, and, by extension, the audience.
The Canadian thriller See For Me introduces us to one of those enviable pieces of real estate that is just begging for a break-in gone wrong: A mansion, located somewhere mountainous and snowy, with those huge floor-to-ceiling windows that make everything look like a diorama. Like all such places, it has a secret: A hidden safe filled with stacks of cash.
But this is all secondary. If anyone is going to remember See For Me, it’s because it is—there’s no elegant way of putting it—the home-invasion movie about a blind ex-Olympic hopeful skiing champion cat sitter. Not just any cat sitter—an elite cat sitter for the rich.
The truth is, the business with the cat is just a way to get Sophie (Skyler Davenport, who, per the press notes, is legally blind in real life) into a big, secluded, unfamiliar house. The owner is going out of town, and she’s been hired last-minute to watch the resident feline. Though the director, Randall Okita, periodically pulls out a decent David Fincher impression—shallow depth of field, crime scene close-ups, the occasional coldly interesting angle)—the opening half-hour is suspense-less and kind of plodding as we wait for intimations of something sinister. Then comes the night, and with it a team a burglars—who are, of course, initially unaware that there’s someone else in the house. For home-invasion cat-and-mouse scenarios, this is about as generic as it gets.
Before long, anyone who’s seen far too many thrillers will begin composing a mental list of missed opportunities. It’s freezing cold outside—shouldn’t this play a bigger part? What about all those little details of Sophie’s life as a blind person that Okita lavishes in close-up at the beginning of the film—couldn’t that be worked into the suspense somehow? And what about her backstory—how she was a teenage champion skier before she started to lose her eyesight?
If anything, the movie needs more skiing. The slopes are right outside! One can picture the scene: The burglars find Sophie. She puts on skis. They put on skis. The chase begins. Audience expectations are wildly subverted. See For Me could be the home-invasion movie with the blind cat-sitter and the ski chase scene. Instead, it’s the home-invasion movie with the blind cat-sitter and the app.
This is an inevitable development. Home-invasion thrillers, after all, have always kind of been about our relationship with phones, going back more than a century to the earliest recognizably modern example of the genre, the D.W. Griffith one-reeler The Lonely Villa. That film not only established some of the tropes we find in See For Me, but also the idea of the telephone as a lifeline. Clever writers eventually found ways to subvert this particular cliché, and then the subversions became clichés: the cut phone line, the call that’s coming from inside the house. Then cell phones came along and ruined movies forever. No other technology has managed to make so many different stories obsolete.
Thus the phone became the enemy of the script. For home-invasion movies (and thrillers in general), this has entailed elaborate games of keep-away. Phones need to be lost, misplaced, smashed, stolen. Considering how much narrative logic they expend on trying to solve the problem of mobile telecommunications, one could even make the argument that the main paranoid influence in these movies is no longer a fear of incursion into one’s private space, but a more modern techno-social anxiety: that irrational feeling that one’s entire life depends on uninterrupted access to a smartphone.
Which brings us to the app, the See For Me of the title. The idea is that it connects a visually impaired user to a sighted volunteer who looks through the user’s phone camera and describes what’s in front of them—in case, for instance, they need someone to read the expiration date on a carton of milk. (The concept is taken from a real app, Be My Eyes.) Sophie begrudgingly downloads the app near the beginning of the film after accidentally locking herself out of the mansion, and is connected to a gamer named Kelly (Jessica Parker Kennedy). This becomes the film’s central gimmick and its putative thematic through line: Sophie needs Kelly to understand what’s going on around her, but she also needs to learn to accept help, be less stubborn, etc.
One can sort of see what the film’s screenwriters, Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue, were trying to do here. They’ve written a home-invasion thriller with a blind protagonist—a premise that was made famous more than half a century ago by Wait Until Dark, and was more recently inverted in the reverse home-invasion thriller Don’t Breathe. (Hush, in which the protagonist is deaf rather than blind, is another variation on the idea.) Yet they don’t want the character to be defined by her blindness, or to make a movie about someone “overcoming” an impairment.
This is admirable, and, to the writers’ credit, they do come up with a fun wrinkle that also briefly introduces some welcome moral ambiguity. Once the burglars realize that Sophie is blind (and therefore can’t identify any of them), it becomes clear that she’s less of a potential witness than a potential accomplice. If she can get rid of the cop who’s already on the way to the mansion, she’ll not only be safe from harm, but will get a cut of the loot. Unfortunately, this idea is only good for a few minutes of onscreen tension.
This is pervasive problem in See For Me: While it’s able to periodically introduce a sense of danger—the burglars’ arrival, the sequence with the cop—it never creates the necessary continuity of dread and suspense. One suspects that this has something to do with the nature of these kinds of thrillers: They do not appeal to our good side. A lot of the best ones are made by control freaks and pervs, people who really do want to sneak up on their characters in the dark. The team behind See For Me are probably too well-intentioned in matters of representation, and too aware of the dangers of the Gaze, to encourage anyone’s voyeurism or sadism. This doesn’t mean that all it takes to make an effective thriller is a slightly sick imagination. But making people uncomfortable in careful proportions is an art.
Which is not say that See For Me doesn’t accidentally end up in some unsettling territory. The app gimmick means that Kelly occasionally has to guide and control Sophie like a video game character—and in the climax, her first-person-shooter skills do come into play. This is presumably meant to make us feel good: It’s a sign of their teamwork, of Sophie overcoming her fear of being helped by others. But it’s also one person controlling a gun-waving stranger via a phone app, telling them to shoot at real people. What kind of creepy minds would come up with that?
51 Comments
Is this part of the blind-victim-turns-the-tables-on-home-invaders cinematic universe established by Don’t Breathe?
Didn’t even ctrl-f first, huh?
Pfft, I didn’t even read past the first sentence.
You pivoted to video and never pivoted back.
It amuses me that the phrase “pivot to video” in, say, 20 years is going to conjure up horrific memories for a small segment of the population, and nobody else will ever know what it means.
You are optimistically assuming this pandemic is a one-off and not something that will happen ever decade or so from now on.
I… don’t really see how that would affect whether people in the future know what the phrase “pivot to video” refers to.
Because pivoting to video will occur in those future pandemics as well. It won’t just be a forgotten feature of the Covid-19 one.
“Pivot to video” is a marketing term from ~2015 when a lot of text-based content sites decided to start making a lot of short-form videos instead, because video ads are much more profitable. It has nothing to do with the pandemic.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video
Ah, I thought you were referring to how many movie releases have pivoted to video streaming rather than being released to theaters during the pandemic. It’s the “horrific memories” part that threw me. I don’t associate 2015 with any horrors. It was a pretty nice year all things considered — pre-pandemic and even Trump was still viewed as a joke candidate rather than someone who could actually be POTUS.
Yeah, but dealing with the whole “pivot to video” thing (which I, being a web developer, had to) was highly traumatic in a “I can’t believe these stupid corporate assholes” way.
It also killed several websites, who probably didn’t realize how much of their traffic depended on people at work reading the articles here and there when they had the chance. I’m actually surprised the AVClub didn’t take that route. Or at least, maybe they did, then pivotted back.
It’s my impression that around that time they started adding more video content (e.g. interviews broken into several chunks, so they could dribble it out over multiple days; the segments with Dowd and Vishnevetsky talking movies in front of a bar set; etc.) but they didn’t really dial down on text articles in response. (Not that they didn’t have other problems.)
Presumably before realizing they lost a lot of their impressions since most people won’t watch video at work.
Because even reading things as short as an Internet article is too much work for some people.
See For Me receives a C from me. -AV Club
Too witty a quip to be AV Club.
Then, dude, seriously, if that’s how you feel, then why are you here?
“The AV Club sucks and is dumb.”-AV Club Reader/Commenter
Jessica Parker Kennedy should have just used her super-speed to help the blind lady
Or she should have used her name tag from her stint at TGI Fridays to bludgeon the burglar. Has she never heard of initials?
Stupid ass title.
Yeah, but it’s got built in sequel titles: See 2 Me and See for M3.
I would also accept See For Mes and See For Me: Electric Boogaloo.
C4 Me (includes a subplot about explosives)
Is that about an autonomous driving BMW? That would actually work for this protagonist!
This sounds like one of those movies where the people who make it consider themselves “above” the genre material.
This is a weirdly in-depth review of a movie most people won’t give a second thought to. I respect it, although I am a bit confused.
Canada actually makes movies! Who would have thought? I thought all the Canadians interested in that moved to the US, and only used Toronto and Vancouver as stand-ins for American cities.
Well, mobile phone jammers are a thing, so that’s one way around the problem, I guess?
Not to mention that if the app is sending out full video, it probably needs Wi-Fi rather than cell signal. Cut the power like in any good heist and the router goes.
You have obviously not experienced the power and speed of Rogers Wireless, Canada’s largest 5G network.
I am a Rogers customer, so I have experienced their reliable serv
I suspect there’s a story here, quite possibly more interesting than the one in the movie!
Maybe put the house somewhere with no cell phone coverage.
In which case they could still use wifi calling. So we’re back to also cutting the power.In this case, I doubt anyone leaves stacks of cash in a home so remote it doesn’t have cell service.
Yeah, I was picturing a cabin with no power, but I see your point. Maybe they should just set a film in 1978.
Meanwhile the observation that cell phones have ruined a lot of plots forever is spot-on. A lot of older movies would be about 10 minutes.
Just saw it because I was intrigued by the detailed review. It’s pretty good, at least better than what Ignatiy implies. Sure, it’s a little by-the-numbers but the gimmick made it entertaining enough for me. The protagonist is a shitty person and that always gives an extra flavor to any movie.
That’s a shame. I’ve gotten really tired lately of protagonists not just being flawed but being, well, shitty.
Wait Until Dark is the scariest movie I have ever seen. I was rocking back and forth sobbing by the end of that movie. I don’t want to see another movie that scary.
What kind of creepy minds would come up with that?
I dunno, but that twist sold me on this movie!Sorry, but Bad Guy Looking to Kill Blind Woman? He Deserves to Riddled with Bullets, Full Stop.
“Cat sitter to the rich” does seem like a whimsical made-up movie job, but I knew a guy whose living was made being Gore Vidal’s cat sitter.
I have a friend who was a personal assistant to a very wealthy late middle-aged woman who had no family of her own. One year for Christmas she gave my friend and the dog walker Land Rovers.
On of the best Movie Nation it Ltd https://www.nationitltd.com/
You don’t name your movie after the goddamned gimmick in your movie. That would be like if Speed were called The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down
One technology that should have completely killed more plots is the personal computer, but somehow past that expiration date we still got some plots where there is only one, typed manuscript (Love, Actually and Misery come to mind, though Annie probably was not going to buy a Macintosh for Paul).
It’s been a long time since I saw the film and I think it didn’t cover it in much detail if at all but in the book, it’s a significant part of Paul Sheldon’s character that even though he logically knows he should make copies of his work, it’s just a habit he’s always had to just have the one copy in existence between completion and taking to his publisher. The novel even makes a point of saying that he burns all his notes on completion too. His manuscript gets covered in much greater detail in the novel than the film (what it’s actually about etc).I didn’t find it unbelievable because I was coincidentally doing exactly the same thing prior to reading Misery with my creative writing projects (of a much much lower stature) despite also knowing better.
Yeah, that one was about a writer’s quirks, so I have no problem giving it a pass. I also thought of The Spanish Prisoner.
I love The Spanish Prisoner, but I wish the switch were somehow more believable. That’s my only problem with the movie, really. The cartoonish accent at the end could be toned down a bit, but if it was their actual accent, then it was.
Sheldon’s definitely of the age where he’d still be working on his trusty manual. And he writes in a remote cabin that I’m quite sure doesn’t have a copier. But in general it’s no big deal (until Annie comes along) – he writes it, smokes his cigarette, and drives the final manuscript back to the city.