EYE FOR AN EYE (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Eye for an Eye, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 19, 2025

There's nothing unique about the premise of Eye for an Eye, which creates a supernatural creature of some urban legend that attacks people. Such horror tales are too common to list, so it's quite a surprise that director Colin Tilley, making his feature debut (after cutting his teeth on a few hundred music videos), brings such a genuinely eerie atmosphere and some smart visual flourishes to what otherwise might have been a routine experience.

Indeed, the whole of the film, including the particulars of its monster and how it operates and why it does target people, is pretty effective. The screenplay by Elisa Victoria and Michael Tully opens with one of those standard prologues of horror movies, in which we're introduced to the concept of the creature and get a quick glimpse of it at work. This entity is called Mr. Sandman, and as the name suggests, its methods involve dreams.

Most will think of an immediate parallel to this character and its gimmick, and yes, there's definitely an argument to be made that the filmmakers have taken one of the most famous horror-movie villains as at least inspiration for their creature. Even the opening dream scene might have fit into one of those tales of nightmares on a particular street, but that doesn't diminish how this one plays.

The prettiest and most popular girl at her local school has a pleasant dream of showing off her cheerleading skills to a non-existent crowd on a platform in front of a barn in some field in the middle of nowhere. As she's pulling off some mid-air flips, she realizes that gravity seems to have stopped working. That is until it finally returns and sends her crashing to the ground—through that wooden stage.

Death, however, isn't Mr. Sandman's aim, as an opening poem about this legend tells us. No, this entity wants its victims' eyes, which it will rip out and eat in front of whoever is on the wrong end of its purpose. To be fair to the supernatural thing, Mr. Sandman does have a sense of morality, though, since it only targets bullies and apparently toys around with them enough to give them a chance to atone for their behavior. That other guy with the knife-tipped fingers isn't nearly as accommodating or considerate.

Anyway, the plot has Anna (Whitney Peak) arriving at the Florida bayou home of her grandmother May (S. Epatha Merkerson), who is blind because, well, she was the teen from the prologue. Anna, currently in her final year of high school, is an orphan after the recent deaths of her parents to a drunk driver, so she'll be finishing school and starting a new life in quite a different place from her previous home in Brooklyn.

The girl becomes fast friends with a pair of idle locals, Julie (Laken Cross) and Shawn (Finn Bennett). While she's initially happy to share time with two and some trauma with Shawn (His father died), it turns out that Shawn is exactly the kind of guy who could be targeted by Mr. Sandman. He teases and taunts a kid (played by Carson Minniear) on rollerblades, before sending the child speeding toward the rail of a bridge.

The boy goes over, shatters his arm, and agrees not to tell anyone who hurt him under threat of Shawn's retribution. Anna's seemingly kind great-aunt Patti (Golda Rosheuvel), though, can spot bullying easily, tells the kid the story of Mr. Sandman, and gives him directions on how to summon the creature to get revenge on whoever hurt him. The boy includes Anna and Julie on his list of targets.

It's refreshing that the screenplay is as straightforward as it is. The film has no greater ambition than to invent a creepy monster, set its vengeful plan in motion, and observe as our trio of tormented young characters are haunted and harmed repeatedly in their nightmares.

It's only about what it's about—the horror plotting, the idea that watching a bully get some kind of comeuppance can be satisfying, suggesting that the line between the bully and bullied can be easily blurred or outright crossed whenever someone goes looking for retribution. After all, Anna and Julie aren't innocent, but it's tough to say they deserve the same punishment as Shawn. There's also the subplot of the two sisters, May and Patti, whose own relationship and past return to complicate the gimmick's morality by the end, too. The film thankfully doesn't get its message or its tactics mixed in attempting to make some grander point about grief, trauma, or whatever other theme has overtaken this genre in recent years.

Instead, it's a good, old-fashioned scare machine, featuring some genuinely effective nightmare sequences—filled with black ooze and increasingly better looks at the unsettling creature causing all of this (Our first real glimpse comes from a neatly subtle trick involving a photograph that changes with the perspective) and, because Tilley trusts that this imagery is strong enough to stand on its own, fewer jump-scares than one might anticipate. The story does eventually reveal the origin of Mr. Sandman, giving the creature an air of tragedy to it, but that moment is mostly striking for the way Tilley stops everything for a flashback portrayed in spooky stop-motion animation.

Eye for an Eye does exactly what it sets out to do. That it does so with some imagination and finesse makes this more than a routine, gimmicky horror affair.

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