Look Away

I was looking at Mr. Skin's best nude scenes of 2018 and found something called Look Away, which features a young actress named India Eisley. I had never heard of her, but it turns out she is the daughter of Olivia Hussey (who was Juliet fifty years ago in Franco Zeffirelli's film). The film was available on Amazon, so I took a look.

It's a very familiar story, going all the way back to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A teenage girl (Eisley), who is morose and bullied in school (right there the film jumps the rails--nobody that beautiful would be picked on by a boy, maybe other girls). Her father (Jason Isaacs) is a plastic surgeon who says he will give her surgery for her birthday. Her mother (Mia Sorvino) is a drunk.

One day, looking in her mirror, her image starts talking back to her. There is an implication that is never fully spelled out, that this is Eisley's dead twin. In any event, this image is the dark side of Eisley's personality. She comes out of the mirror and wreaks havoc on those who have wronged her.

Look Away, written and directed by Assaf Bernstein, is too derivative to be truly good, but it isn't aggressively terrible. Eisley shows off some nice range by playing two aspects of personality. One thing that I notice seems to be a trend in horror films is that everything is so dark. Would a teenage girl really have almost all the lights out in her bathroom? Sometimes horror works best in broad daylight, as a scene involving an ice skating accident shows. Pay the light bill!