Starry Eyes begins with a deceptively auspicious start—an obsessed starlet (played by Alex Essoe) stumbles to her first acting job—relying on studious atmospherics that evoke very much the work of David Cronenberg. There is a brooding sense of mystery in the film that is well-built up, and also almost Lynchian, on what hell the young actress has brought unto herself when she takes a chance at the Devil’s hand. But then, in approaching the dreadful third act replete with mushed faces and slashed guts, writer-directors Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch prove unable, nor that do they have much interest, in drawing deep beyond the lush superficialities of their film.
All style, no substance—the old folk say. And if Starry Eyes is all texture, it is an interesting texture that keeps the audience looking for much long. This year has been exceptional for arthouse-horror, especially with Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman launched, both terrific works that far exceed Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio which in my book was one of if not the best horror film last year. Yet to cite a primary antecedent of Starry Eyes, Cronenberg’s Videodrome seems the most accurate film. Both of them set a nightmarish scape that is the world of film and television; the main difference is that the latter actually has something to say about it.
If anything, the film is a literation of how an insecure woman feels under her skin. Essoe plays the said woman named Sarah—a struggling non-professional actress who works as one of the wait staff in a small Los Angeles diner—and she plays the role with laudable restraint. “Sarah, if you can’t really let yourself go, how can you ever transform into something else?” asks the sinister-looking casting director (Maria Olsen). She lets go, finally, as far as trading sex for the role to Astreus Pictures-producer played by Louis Dezseran. At home she is surrounded by her friends whom she deems of having no ambition; they opt to settle for a job that “pays the bills.” But she is not “a million other girls,” she says, and she must act on claiming her shot, falling ultimately on a deal she is forced to make with a satanic cult.
Unlike Ti West’s The House of the Devil and more like The Innkeepers, Sarah’s crises are more existential than economical—or at least that is only what the film has managed to present. Later on, an aspiring filmmaker portrayed by Noah Segen (Cabin Fever 2: Summer Fever), makes an assertion that perfectly encapsulates Sarah’s innermost turmoil, of her ‘fits’ that are more like tantrums: “this is the issue with the millennial generation. It’s just, it’s entitlement.”
This is an aspect which makes enough promise, because it is true; but Starry Eyes delivers only a tasteless bloodbath in the end—suspiciously dazed, Essoe’s otherworldly eyes gazing skyward, perhaps reminded that it is a horror film and it needed blood. Trouble is, in doing so, Widmyer and Kolsch renders all their studious efforts moot and vain.
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STARRY EYES (NR)
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Dir./Scr. Dennis Widmyer, Kevin Kolsch
Cast. Alex Essoe, Noah Segen, Amanda Fuller…
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“Ambition, the blackest of human desires…everyone has it, but how many act on it?”
~The Producer (Louis Dezseran)
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