My Left Eye Sees Ghosts – Review

May has just become a newlywed and a widower in the same week. Her rich husband drowns during their honeymoon and coincidentely enough, wrote her into his will. Now with his passing she is now the heir to his millions and millions of dollars. As she is out partying and enjoying her rich new-foud lifestyle, May has a slight brush with death and is given the so called “sixth sense.” She can now see ghosts with her left eye open.

This movie starts out making you laugh and giggle and you’d be sure you are watching a comedy. It changes, however, in an instance without you even knowing it. Seeing a non-American chick flick is a revelation of sorts, and one wishes the American directors of movies like this would all be sat down in a theater to watch My Left Eye Sees Ghosts. None of the manipulation; it’s all storyline, character chemistry, and pacing. While the screenplay slacks too often, it’s quite forgivable, really. My Left Eye may be corny, it may be over-the-top, but it’s also oh-so-pleasant. Deeply profound and moving, this could just be brushed off as being a “chick flick” if it weren’t for the moments of outright hilarity in it as well. It asks of the viewer to believe in love, and if you’re capable of doing that, I promise that this will not disappoint.

My Left Eye is very done, there’s great direction, humour and heart-warming romance but then it provides no surprises from his last few outings. I can detect that it was really trying very hard to do something different but it ended up treading the comfortable ground constructed so well by To and Wai Ka Fai. Although I admit at first I didn’t like the character of May, I grew to enjoy her quirky eccentricities. Aside the technical mumbo jumbo, Hong Kong does classify this as a horror movie which is absurd. Don’t let the horror labeling put you off. If you set the horror elements of this movie aside, what’s left at the core is a touching story of two people who must learn to let go in spite of the fact that they love each other very much.

To say more gives away too much of a good plot, but this film manages to be lighthearted without being trivial. Director Johnny To has made several excellent films, but nothing like this that I’ve seen. He’s generally a Hong Kong action director, but this is a ghostly tale of human loss & the rediscovery of life. Fortunately, for this movie, the progression of the movie does get better and the movie ends with you content of what has happened. Overall, the film was enjoyable with a strong, effective storyline and extremely likeable characters. Yet another girly movie, but one to leave you with a warm, tingly feeling inside! Yay! That should counter the feelings of all the violent, bloody movies I usually review.