Coming of age in the age of the internet is terrifying. Pair that with an obsessive personality, raging hormones, and family drama that continues to bubble to the surface and you’ve got something special. In Formidable File Films’ It Needs Eyes, all of those topics come to fruition in an eerie, dark trip into a local town secret.
A troubled teen moves to her aunt’s coastal house, where she escapes into dark corners of the internet. Her fixation on a mysterious missing woman’s videos leads to disturbing discoveries about the digital underworld and her own secrets.
It Needs Eyes, IMDB
Rowan (played by Raquel Lebish) is sent to live with her Aunt Mella (Lydia Fiore) for the summer after experiencing the harrowing hospitalization of her father. She spends her days browsing social platforms on her phone by herself, eventually coming across a series of bizarre and uncanny videos featuring now-disappeared actress “Fish Tooth” (Lola Blanc). Even Rowan’s newfound friend and sometime love, Alex (Isadora Leiva), can’t break her from the mystery unfolding on screen. Soon, Rowan’s world falls apart as she discovers more videos that link to the island just across from her Aunt’s home. Through grief, anxiety, and addiction to the web, she is pulled in too deep, drowning in a sea of lost media mysteries.
As one reviewer on IMDB put it, It Needs Eyes deserves more eyes. There is just something about this movie that kept me hooked; from the likeable and empathetic characters, to the cryptic online media, and the nostalgic feeling of being a misunderstood teen, this movie was so engrossing. Funny, considering Rowan is herself obsessed with the new “genre” she has stumbled across.
I am very interested in Lost Media, and there are a few movies that It Needs Eyes reminded me of: Censor, The Canal, and Broadcast Signal Intrusion. The idea of a very strange piece of media with no accompanying information can certainly lead one down a thousand rabbit holes. And seeing how Rowan falls into this spiral of uncertainty — so much so that it changes her personality and takes over her life — gives this film an intensely creepy edge. Being a teen myself in the years of budding social media (yes, I had a MySpace), Rotten.com and Live Leak, I know personally how easy it is to become desensitized to troubling images and video, going as far as to seek them out. And when something catches your eye, it’s impossible to just let it go.
But for Rowan, it’s worse; her trauma with finding her dad after an overdose, not being able to talk to him, rekindling the relationship with her aunt, falling in love — all of those things make It Needs Eyes not just a horror movie, but a coming of age movie. It’s this weird combo that mixes such strong emotions into a pile of goop that we can’t help but poke, like a stranded jellyfish on the beach. Rowan’s obsession with the Fish Tooth girl in the film is her seeking out comfort in all the wrong places. Perhaps she sees herself in those tapes: lost and crying out for help to an audience that watches, yet ignores her pleas.
It Needs Eyes was a beautifully shot, profound supernatural flick that left me feeling cold and scared. Though there are frightening moments near the end, the fear produced comes mainly from a droning apprehension and call to the void. It’s not filled with jumpscares and grotesque body horror, but rather dread and unease. It Needs Eyes is stuck in my chest cavity, quietly pulsating and making my adrenaline go through the roof. Rowan is obsessed with Fish Tooth. And I am obsessed with Rowan. You too should be obsessed with It Needs Eyes.
It Needs Eyes has finished its festival run and is coming soon! For more information, visit Formidable File Films on web and Instagram.
