Directors: Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Writers: Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Cast: Alex Essoe, Amanda Fuller, Noah Segan, Fabianne Therese, Pat Healy, Maria Olsen
Runtime: 98 mins.
2014
As you can see above, the DVD cover for Starry Eyes features a young dehydrated woman with her head tilted at a strange angle. She's probably looking up at that bizarrely generous pullquote from Time. "Did you see the same movie I did, Michael Roffman?" she asks. "Or maybe it's that you've never seen any of Lynch or Cronenberg's work." After all, those are two directors known more than anything for their uncanny weirdness, their ability to make us squint and squeam and walk away feeling gross, but also feeling like we'd just witnessed something totally unique.
The Starry Eyes DVD cover literally features a woman with stars on her eyes. That's pretty on the nose for a movie about eyes.
The central beat-you-over-the-heady metaphor gets even worse when you start watching the movie. Our protagonist is this girl Sarah (Alex Essoe), and she wants to be a star (!), but hasn't managed to land a breakthrough role. So instead of living the la-la land dream, she's stuck working at a lousy restaurant called Big Taters (essentially Hooters but potato-themed) and hanging around with a group of lousy millennials who just want to hang around at the poolside and party in dumb ways. But when a mysterious production company called Astraeus (!) Pictures (which means "starry surprise" in Greek or something like that) posts an ad seeking a young actress full of life and eager to give herself to the production of a film called The Silver Scream (!), she feels she has found her breakthrough role. Unfortunately, the casting process requires more of Sarah than she may be willing to give... such as her immortal soul (!).
If I'm being fair, I can't fault Starry Eyes for not trying. It's clear the movie's heart is in the right place, and there are some good ideas here. I wouldn't be surprised if these filmmakers go on to make something neat at some point down the line. The production design is pretty decent, the cinematography is pretty decent, the performances are pretty decent. It's uncommon for horror movies to even achieve that much. Unfortunately, all those pretty decent aspects never congeal into a satisfying whole, and instead jangle against each other in a "this is so close to being so much better" sort of way.
Our starlet (!) Sarah is a starry-eyed (!) striver. She aspires to great things, and is dissatisfied with her current lot in life. That's pretty near-universal stuff, and our ability to relate to her should make her eventual corruption all the more powerful. Unfortunately, Alex Essoe's performance alienated me almost immediately. She throws herself into the role admirably, but her choices alter between bland and way too smiley. When things aren't going well in her pursuit of stardom (!), she walks around like a zombie, all expressiveness powerblasted out of her face. People try to have conversations with her and she stares blankly back. This is supposed to make us feel her discontent, but all it accomplishes is making us not want to hang out with her. She stumbles through auditions in the most ordinary way, and when we should be wishing her on to greatness, we just understand why she isn't cast in anything. Her sole unique character trait is unsurprisingly the most interesting thing about her--when disappointed in herself, she has fits that involve some intense hair-yanking. Like, she yanks it out. It's gross.
Starry Eyes hampers itself with an unlikable protagonist, but the side characters fare no better. One character named Erin (Fabianne Therese), a member of Sarah's friends group, only ever insults Sarah. That is her role in the movie--every time Sarah says something, she fires back a passive aggressive insult, followed by "just kidding come on guys you knew I was kidding right??" It's cloying. It also leaves us totally unsurprised and totally apathetic when she meets her ultimate fate (SPOILER stabby stab stab END SPOILER).
The only other side player who even pretends to be a character is Danny, played by Noah Segan. I tried hard to be interested in him because I know Segan from Rian Johnson's filmography (Looper, Brick, The Brothers Bloom), but once again I was thwarted by the script. He was in a whole lot of scenes, but I could glean absolutely no information about him beyond these three tidbits: 1) He wants to direct a movie and cast his friends. 2) He seems to have a crush on Sarah. 3) He has sex with Erin sometimes. I wanted to care about this guy, I really did. But I was bored with him by the time he met his ultimate fate (SPOILER stabby stab stab END SPOILER).
The rest of her friend group is so ill-developed that I watched one of them get killed at the very end of the movie, only to realize in the following scene that the person I thought got killed was still alive--I knew absolutely nothing about the dead person. If you were being defensive you could point out that this character was only cannon fodder, not important to the plot at all, but if a movie like Mad Max: Fury Road (a film that Starry Eyes writer/director Dennis Widmyer is obsessed with) can imbue its sub-tertiary characters with depth and intrigue, surely Starry Eyes can characterize someone enough so that I know who I'm looking at when they meet their ultimate fate (SPOILER smashy smash smash END SPOILER).
You'll notice I haven't said anything about the evil production company cult yet, and that's because there isn't a whole lot to say. The folks who make Sarah do weird things during the casting process (Maria Olsen + Marc Senter) go for a performance somewhere in between scary and satire, and the end result is kind of a watery mishmash of both. Same goes for the producer (Louis Dezseran). That being said, the sequences involving the production company cult are the best parts of the movie, significantly more engaging than Sarah wandering in and out of inconsequential social interactions. Too bad Astraeus (!) Pictures, like everything else in Starry Eyes, feels underdeveloped to the point of disinterest. The filmmakers are clearly going for a less is more approach, giving us snippets of Astraeus (!) in an effort to build a sense of foreboding and pique our curiosity. The people involved with Astraeus (!) are supposed to make us uncomfortable because it feels like there's something wrong about them. The old Rosemary's Baby strategy. Unfortunately, the cultists' performances are so broad, and their plot so unclear and weightless, that we feel none of that foreboding. We merely observe, "Huh, I guess they're evil," and move on.
Plus they like to say things like "You must bury your old self in the earth before you can ascend to the skies," returning us to my original complaint. We get it. Hollywood is about stars. Stars are pentagrams. Becoming a star comes at a heavy price. You're called Starry Eyes. You don't have to spell it out for me anymore.
At the end her eyes change by the way.
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If you're looking for some good psychological-supernatural-body horror about the perils of obsession in pursuit of one's craft, I can't think of a good reason not to watch Black Swan instead. Starry Eyes has potential, but it is squandered. And you know what, Starry Eyes? I'm not even mad. Just disappointed.
2 / 5 BLOBS
After all, those are two directors known more than anything for their uncanny weirdness, their ability to make us squint and squeam and walk away feeling gross, but also feeling like we'd just witnessed something totally unique.executive sober living ny
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