★★★
“Wait Until After Dark”
Yeah, as the above might suggest, this owes a rather large debt to Wait Until Dark, with its central theme of an attractive, blind protagonist threatened by home invaders. It is not the first to have gone down that road (see also In Darkness), and I must say, the concepts here are considerably more contrived. However, the film does just about enough to sell them, to make for an entertaining end product. The heroine Sophie (Davenport) was a promising skier until a degenerative eye condition ended her career, leaving her almost totally blind. Now, she’s rather grumpy, frequently berating her mother (Brown), and picking up occasional house-sitting gigs, engaging in small-scale larceny against her employers to fatten the paycheck.
Her latest such position turns unpleasant when a trio of thugs, under the direction of Rico (Coates), enter the house, seeking a large stash of cash hidden behind a panel. They are as surprised by Sophie’s presence, as she is by theirs. You’d think this would be a quick, one-sided struggle. But Sophie has an ally, in the form of the titular app. It connects her with a seeing helper, typically for assistance with humdrum daily tasks, and the helper in this case is former army member Kelly (Kennedy). Between her military training and fondness for first-person shooters, she knows a thing or two about creeping stealthily around a house, and taking out enemy targets – skills she’s happy to use to assist Sophie.
What’s at least somewhat interesting, is that Davenport is legally blind. This seems an ongoing trend. While it makes sense, considering Hollywood’s recent obsession with “authenticity” in things like gender identity, I’m always reminded of the famous story about Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier from Marathon Man – “Why don’t you just try acting?” It’s also notable that she’s not your typical heroine. Indeed, she arguably borders on the unlikable, between her abrasive attitude and petty thievery. Though some other reviews I’ve read suggest that severely weakens the film, I can’t say I minded too much. My bigger concern was a plot that teetered almost forever on the edge of implausibility, e.g. the way Sophie’s phone battery went from 20% to zero in a couple of minutes. While there was nothing utterly outrageous, all these micro-implausibilities added up over the course of proceedings.
Within those constraints the film still had some successes. The best sequence probably had a police officer show up, with Sophie trying desperately to get the cop to go away. This screwed the tension level up considerably, with the officer insisting there was more going on than Sophie would admit. Thereafter, it does degenerate somewhat into lots of creeping around dark corridors. Or, at least, the level of dark corridors movies tend to have, which are just enough well-lit for a camera, and thus the audience. If the ending abandons the film’s titular concept, and probably provides the cherry of implausibility, the cake as a whole remains adequately edible.
Dir: Randall Okita
Star: Skyler Davenport, Jessica Parker Kennedy, Kim Coates, Natalie Brown