Spanish thriller JULIA'S EYES (LOS OJOS DE JULIA; dir Guillem Morales; 2010) nearly made me tear my hair out, what little there is of it, in frustration. The first hour of it is the most exciting thing I have seen in a long time. It concerns Julia and her investigations into the suicide of her twin sister. Like her sister, Julia suffers from a degenerative eye disease that is threatening to make her blind. She starts to suspect that all is not as it seems concerning her sister's death, while a mysterious presence, hovering at the edge of her deteriorating vision, seems to follow her around. This part of the film has a wonderful atmosphere of paranoia and mystery and seems to promise to go places we have never been before. In the second hour, however, the film descends into rank garbage of an all too familiar kind, played out at a glacial pace. It is as if the two halves were written by two different people, one of them a genius, the other one not so much. Stop watching at the hour mark; you will be better off forever wondering what happens.

