Open Your Eyes (1997 film)

Plot

A young, handsome man wakes up to a female voice that is telling him to open his eyes. He drives to an empty city. He wakes up again, this time to a woman in his bed. He tells her not to leave messages on his alarm.

From a prison cell in Madrid, the 25-year-old man, César (Eduardo Noriega), tells his story to a psychiatrist, Antonio (Chete Lera), while wearing a prosthetic mask. Flashbacks reveal the following events: good-looking César is attractive to women. At his birthday party, he flirts with Sofía (Penélope Cruz), a classmate of his best friend, Pelayo (Fele Martínez). 

Later on, he takes her home and stays the night, although they do not sleep together. The next morning, César's obsessive ex-lover, Nuria (Najwa Nimri), pulls up outside Sofía's flat, offering him a ride and sex. On the way to her home, however, she crashes the car with the intent to kill them both. César is horribly disfigured, beyond the help of cosmetic surgery, so he decides to wear a mask to conceal his face. Sofía cannot bear to see him and tries to keep her distance.

After César's disfigurement, he begins to have a series of disorienting experiences. Drunk, César falls asleep in the street. On awakening, everything has changed: Sofía now claims to love him and the surgeons restore his lost looks. But as he makes love to Sofía one night, she suddenly changes into Nuria. Horrified, César smothers her with a pillow, yet finds everyone else believes Nuria was indeed the woman everyone else calls Sofía.

While he is confined to the prison, fragments of his past return to him as if in a dream. It is revealed that, shortly after his disfigurement, César signed a contract with Life Extension, a company specializing in cryonics, to be cryogenically preserved and to experience extremely lucid and lifelike virtual reality dreams. Returning to their headquarters, under supervision by prison officers, he discovers they specialize in cryonics with a twist: "artificial perception" or the provision of a fantasy based on the past to clients who are reborn in the future. 

He had committed suicide at home after sleeping drunk on the street and was placed in cryonic suspension. His experiences from about the midpoint of the movie onwards have been a dream, spliced retroactively into his actual life and replacing his true memories. At the end of the film he elects to wake up and be resurrected. Convinced his life since the drunken night in the street is simply a nightmarish vision created by Life Extension, César leaps from the roof of the company's high-rise headquarters, and wakes to a female voice telling him to relax and open his eyes.

Cast

Critical reception

Open Your Eyes received mostly positive reviews. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 85% approval rating based on reviews from 46 critics, with a weighted average score of 7.4 out of 10. The site's critical consensus states: "Director Alejandro Amenábar tackles some heady issues with finesse and clarity in Open Your Eyes, a gripping exploration of existentialism and the human spirit". James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film three and a half stars (out of four), saying that movies "of this intelligence, audacity, and complexity come along so rarely that it's mandatory to cry out their arrival" and that "those who see it will not quickly forget the experience". Rob Blackwelder of SplicedWire gave the film four stars (out of four), calling it "a jaw-dropping psychological thriller" that's "beautifully orchestrated".

Richard Scheib of The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review also gave Open Your Eyes four stars, calling it "quite a remarkable film". Holly E. Ordway of DVD Active said, "I don’t give out “perfect 10” ratings lightly, but Open Your Eyes earns one by all accounts". However, Aaron Beierle of DVD Talk gave a more lukewarm review, saying that he "found most of Open Your Eyes interesting" but remarked that "there's something about the picture that kept me from being completely involved".

American remake

Director Cameron Crowe's film Vanilla Sky (2001) is a remake of Open Your Eyes. It stars Tom Cruise in the lead role (renamed David Aames), Penélope Cruz reprising her role as Sofia, Cameron Diaz as the girl who disfigures David (renamed Julianna Gianni), Jason Lee as the friend (renamed Brian Shelby), and Kurt Russell as the psychiatrist (renamed Curtis McCabe). The film also transplants the action from Madrid to New York City. The film follows the original plot very closely but makes several changes to the ending.

Soundtrack

1. "Glamour" - Amphetamine Discharge (6:03)
2. "Risingson" - Massive Attack (5:29)
3. "El detonador EMX-3" - Chucho (5:17)
4. "How do" - Sneaker Pimps (5:04)
5. "Sick of you" - Onion (4:28)
6. "T-sebo" - Side Effects (5:44)
7. "Flying away" - Smoke City (3:50)
8. "Arrecife" - Los Coronas (3:11)
9. "Yo mismo" - If (3:37)
10. "Tremble (goes the night)" - The Walkabouts (5:02)
11. "El detonador remix" – Chucho / Side Effects (5:01)

1. "Abre los ojos" (2:28)
2. "Sofía" (1:12)
3. "Soñar es una mierda" (1:04)
4. "La operación" (1:33)
5. "¿Dónde está Sofía?" (0:54)
6. "El parque" (3:08)
7. "Hipnosis" (2:20)
8. "Quítate la careta" (2:56)
9. "Eres mi mejor amigo" (2:41)
10. "La única explicación" (2:05)
11. "Quiero verte" (6:38)
12. "Esa sonrisa" (0:53)
13. "Deja vu" (1:51)
14. "Excarcelación" (4:28)
15. "La vida" (1:46)
16. "La azotea" (5:21)
17. "Créditos finales" (3:31)

Source: Abre Los Ojos at Discogs (list of releases).