Friday, January 1, 2021

Evil Eye: an avalanche of ethnic stereotypes

 

Greetings, commies!

Happy New Year! Today's rotten turnip is a tryin'-to-be mystical thriller Evil Eye, a part of the Blumhouse anthology. A seemingly perfect romance turns into a nightmare when a mother becomes convinced her daughter's new boyfriend has a dark connection to her own past.

My thoughts:

Thumbs down for the sloppy, flippant, simplistic Indian stereotypes. The campy, lame depiction of a complex culture turns this supernatural thriller into a caricature. Indians are portrayed as superstitious, xenophobic, arrogant and obsessed with matrimonial politics. If you have any Indian friends or coworkers, ask them what they think about the movie, just out of curiosity. Most importantly, the cultural component does nothing to enhance the plot. This could have happened with any ethnic group. So the plot and the ethnicity kind of exist side by side, in separate universes, not really enhancing each other. The concept of curse, evil eye, reincarnation is not unique to Hinduism, yet the screenplay makes it sound like it's somehow tied to Hindu folklore. This really doesn't teach you anything about Indian culture, more about Indian stereotypes. So try to divorce the plot from the setting if you want to make the experience more enjoyable.