Thursday, January 6, 2022

Familiar scenario but a few new twists

In 1967’s Wait Until Dark, Audrey Hepburn played a blind woman confronting a vicious criminal (Alan Arkin). The idea of a blind person trying to fight off home invaders hardly qualifies as new, but See For Me benefits from a couple of novel twists, the principal one involving an app called See For Me, which gives the movie its title. A blind woman (a visually impaired Skyler Davenport) takes a job cat sitting in a luxe home in a forest. As a former skier, Davenport's Sophie has become bitter at being robbed of her career by a degenerative eye disease. Upon arriving at the home,  Sophie calls her pal Cam (Keaton Kaplan) and asks him to guide her through the house using her cell phone. He balks when Sophie proposes stealing an expensive bottle of wine for re-sale, something she’s evidently done before. When Sophie locks herself out of the house, she calls the See for Me app and makes contact with Kelly (Jessica Parker Kennedy), a young woman who helps Sophie re-enter the house and also becomes her lifeline when Sophie realizes that several men have broken into the house. They're thieves for whom Sophie becomes a surprise obstacle. Director Randall Okita occasionally taxes credibility but deftly builds tension in ways that may remind some viewers of Don't Breathe, a 2016 movie in which a blind veteran confronts three thieves. While not entirely fresh, See For Me proves a mostly efficient helping of genre entertainment. 



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