Mark Reviews Movies: SEE FOR ME

See for Me, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 6, 2022

Screenwriters Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue give us a pretty clever premise with See for Me, in which a visually impaired woman must deal with intruders in an unfamiliar space. Sections of the resulting story work—and quite well—as director Randall Okita uses assorted tricks of lighting, staging, and camera placement to keep us as aware or unaware of these surroundings as our protagonist. Indeed, the movie is at its most effective when the filmmakers embrace the simplicity of its hide-and-seek gimmick, but that, of course, cannot last for too long. Eventually, matters become just a bit too convoluted and contrived for this confined story's own good.

We meet Sophie (Skyler Davenport, who is also visually impaired but doesn't let that be the full extent of this character), a former skier who quit the sport after an illness left her legally blind (Sophie can sense light, but that's the extent of her vision now). The young woman lives with her mother (Natalie Brown), who hovers, interrogates, and coddles Sophie to an understandable but, especially to the daughter, frustrating degree.

Sophie wants to do everything she can on her own. It's a lot more than is assumed by just about every character she encounters here, from her mother and all the way to those intruders.

Along the way to the movie's most vitally fateful encounter, we learn that Sophie has been housesitting to earn money. She has a new client: a wealthy woman named Debra (Laura Vandervoort), who lives in a grand, secluded mansion in the woods somewhere in upstate New York. Brushing aside Debra's insistence to figuratively and literally hold her hand through the house and her responsibilities, Sophie shows herself to be stubbornly independent. One of the smarter and more considered decisions on Yorke and Gushue's part is that Sophie's self-reliant attitude is deserved. Other characters may treat the protagonist with some degree of condescension and/or pity, but the movie itself never does.

Anyway, Sophie is left alone in the house, puts a beeping monitor on Debra's cat, and starts a video call her friend Cam (Keaton Kaplan), who helps to guide her through the halls and into the assorted rooms of the big house (A dead spot for the cell signal is one of the subtler setups to be paid off later). Cam wants Sophie to take up skiing again, with his help as a guide, but Sophie would rather abandon the sport entirely than admit she can't do it on her own. She can watch a house, take care of a cat, and steal an expensive bottle of Debra's wine by herself. That'll have to be enough for now.

The filmmakers take their time with all of this—establishing the main character (as well as her attitude—as much as, if not more than, her abilities and limitations), giving us a sense of the layout of the house, setting up the other major gimmick. That last part has to do with a cellphone application, which allows a visually impaired user to contact a volunteer helper on demand. Sophie has to use it when an automatic lock shuts her out of the house, and on the other end, there's Kelly (Jessica Parker Kennedy), a military veteran, who lives in Florida and treats Sophie with enough respect to speak plainly with her.

The app comes in handy when Sophie is awakened in the middle of the night by voices in the house. A pair of thieves (played by Pascal Langdale and Joe Pingue) have come for a hidden safe. With Kelly's help, Sophie has to evade them.

There's more to the story, obviously—a couple more villains, a choice that makes Sophie more morally ambiguous than we might anticipate, a few more obstacles to her long night of survival. The peak of it, though, is this first sequence of suspense. During it, Sophie, trying to find the source of the noise and to hide from the robbers, and one of the intruders, discovering that someone is in the house and looking for the unexpected resident, stay a step or two ahead of or behind each other. Okita stages this scene like an elaborate dance of close calls, near misses, and aligning paths. There's particular skill in the way the director and the cinematographers (Jordan Oram and Jackson Parrell) use restricted lighting, wide shots, and obstructed viewpoints, in order to play with the sense of perspective of this sequence.

A couple of similar sequences follow this one. One of them involves a not-too-surprise visitor to the house and features its own less-precise choreography. Then, there's the story's extended climax, which is set among darkened spaces (reflecting Sophie's uncertainty of where things and people are—but also coming across as a bit of a cheat) and continues to add threats in a way that quickly starts to feel manufactured and repetitive.

Throughout, Davenport's performance is solid, particularly in setting up and adjusting how and why we maintain a sense of sympathy for Sophie (The character's most important and most questionable decision is understandable—even if Sophie's attempts to pull it off aren't convincing on a writing level, making the character come across as momentarily less intelligent than has been established). Because of that, See for Me is about more than its central gimmick, although the gimmick does become too thin too quickly.

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