Open Your Eyes

1997, Alejandro Amenábar, Spain/France/Italy

Content Note: Suicide theme

A late 90s cult classic remade shortly after its original Spanish release as Vanilla Sky, Open Your Eyes is decidedly less vanilla than black ice, and presents a less linear and more immediate examination of the questions director Alejandro Amenábar would revisit later in 2004’s award-winning The Sea Inside (Mar Adentro) with Javier Bardem.

Boorish, babe-ish Madrid banker César (Eduardo Noriega) brushes off one night stand Nuria (Najwa Nimri) and then steals his best friend’s girlfriend Sofía (Penélope Cruz), with whom he falls happily in love. César’s charmed existence, however, cracks around the edges: there are oddly violent plot-holes in his story, his nightmares seem more real than they should be, and the skewed timeline hints at something gone horribly awry.

To open your eyes too much at this stage would give away a lot of the fun: it’s enough to say that this sleek psychological thriller draws on the concerns of its age (it leans hard into the crazy ex-girlfriend trope and puts our obsession with youth and appearance under the microscope) but also prefigures the great sci-fi films of the late millennium, presenting an original alternate reality a full two years before The Matrix arrived.

“What is waking? What is dream? What is reality? What is fantasy? What is sanity? What is madness? Such questions pervade Open Your Eyes, … which darts among such relative novelties as virtual reality and cryogenics, is at bottom a retelling of the story of Job for a vain, materialistic, selfish age.” – Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times