CLOSE YOUR EYES. 2002

Goran Visnjic of the prime-time television series ER heads a competent cast who make Close Your Eyes reasonably attention-holding. Visnjic plays a hypnotherapist who fears his own telepathic powers which put him too deeply in contact with the minds of patients. But he his abilities are needed to help solve a series of brutal murders, by accessing the mind of a little girl traumatized into muteness.

Close Your Eyes can't decide if it wants to be a full-blown horror film, or a detective story, & comes off ultimately as a "safe" thriller infused with soul-searching & angst rather than with overt blood or mayhem, keeping it suitable for television's public airwaves.

An obvious & disatisfying ending reduces this film to less than entirely effective, but it is well acted & suspensful for the duration, tense & eerie, a speck too long, yet unquestionably a peg above what horror films have all too often become.

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