MY LITTLE EYE

Directed by Marc Evans. 2002. United Kingdom, France, Canada.

Five strangers are competing to win a $1,000,000 prize. The contest? To live together for six months in an isolated house filled with cameras broadcasting their every word and action to the internet. Surely, there’s something more to it, right? Some goal? A kind of conflict? No. Just five strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. There is no phone in the house and no internet access. Only one room is free from recording devices. All of their supplies are left outside for them by a delivery guy they never see. They don’t even know what the surrounding area looks like.

We join them at the tail end of these six months. In just a few short days, they’ll have won the contest. We would expect them to be at each other’s throats or, at the very least, for the group to have fractured into cliques, but no. Those five strangers have become five friends. Sure, there are some minor bruises among them. Rex, the layabout cynic who is in it just for the money, seems to have once had a thing with Charlie, the attention whore sexpot, but that has since gone ice cold. Matt, the loner craftsman, is clearly in love with the shy, wholesome Emma, but she’s not at all interested. And Danny? Well, Danny is a bit of a loner, quiet but friendly.

None of these people are screaming, yelling, breaking down in hysterics, throwing shit around the room, or at all resentful about anything that may have happened in the months they’ve spent living off-camera in this house. Everything seems fine and cordial.

And maybe it’s that peace and harmony among the castmates that causes some rather strange events to happen. The heat suddenly stops working. Not a good thing to happen when you’re living in a house surrounded by snowy wilderness. Emma recalls her childhood and tells the group about an old classmate who used to love scaring her when she was a kid. One day, that classmate snapped and killed his parents. The last she heard, he was institutionalized. A little later, Emma will find the words “sick bitch” spelled out on the bathroom windows, the same insult her parent-killing tormentor used to call her. One day, their supply box is full of nothing but bricks. Danny receives a letter telling him that his beloved grandfather has died. Their next supply box contains only a gun and five bullets.

While these events cause Emma and Danny to contemplate quitting, Rex quickly convinces them otherwise. It’s just The Company, he tells them. They’re trying to scare them into leaving and forfeiting the prize money. That makes sense, not just from a financial standpoint, but from the perspective of a production company that is watching their cast spend their days sexless and living in peace. They want drama. They want quitters. And what better way to get quitters than to play hideous pranks, like leaving a bloody hammer in Emma’s bed.

One night, a man named Travis arrives at the house. He is a hiker, or so he says, who got lost in the snow. After inviting him inside, Travis asks why they are this far out in the wilderness. When they explain that they are the stars of a reality internet show, Travis is confused. He’s a computer programmer who “lives on the net,” and yet he’s never heard of them. Rex is cynical. Clearly, he thinks, Travis is working for The Company. He’s here as yet another prod to get them to leave early. While Travis doesn’t get anyone to leave, he does get Charlie into bed. After everyone is asleep, we see Travis wandering through the house, eventually approaching a camera mounted in the bathroom. Staring into the camera, he triumphantly declares, “I told you I could fuck her”.

The next day, Danny finds Travis’s damaged backpack discarded in the woods. Using the broken sat nav unit from the backpack, Rex manages to get internet access. To everyone’s surprise, Travis appears to have told them the truth. There is no mention of this show, only a “beta site” that requires an extraordinary amount of money to access. Rex thinks he knows exactly what is going on here, something to do with the dark web, red rooms, and snuff movies.

Time has robbed MY LITTLE EYE of much of its novelty. Reality TV spoofs and satirical horror films ran rampant in the years after the debut of MTV’s The Real World and competition shows like Survivor. SERIES 7: THE CONTENDERS, KOLOBOS, SLASHERS, HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION... the list is a half mile long. All of the little things MY LITTLE EYE does well have been done better dozens of times since. You need to view it from a historical perspective to really appreciate it, much in the same way that you need to approach THE LAST BROADCAST and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT as progenitors of the found footage sub-genre, and not as modern entries.

MY LITTLE EYE isn’t really a scary movie. It’s much more of a disquieting watch. There’s something intensely creepy about the whirring of cameras in the background, and the way the camera looks around the room before slowly zooming in on a character trying to have a moment all to themselves. You can feel the human agency behind everything. The camera becomes an almost supernatural presence, everywhere at once, all-seeing and all-knowing. It enhances the claustrophobia and makes the simple voyeuristic act of looking at someone sitting on the edge of their bed into a perverse, threatening action.

The film makes the usual accusations against its audience, targeting capitalism and corporatism, and even throws some barbs at the individuals who would eagerly sign away their privacy for a chance at fame and easy money. This kind of exploitative model is a circle, after all, but it doesn’t say anything particularly new to an audience that has been awash in this kind of thing since the early 2000s. Going into MY LITTLE EYE expecting a new take on the ethics of reality TV is a fool’s errand.

Returning to MY LITTLE EYE for the first time in probably 10 years was an overall pleasant surprise, but not without its troubles. For one, I would have preferred a longer film. According to IMDb, the original cut of MY LITTLE EYE ran four whole hours, which sounds excruciating. That said, we definitely could have used more time with our castmates before the five-month time jump. While well-defined and likable, our characters are still fairly generic. We don’t really have much time to get to know them before the plot kicks off. When we meet them, they are at the ends of the arcs. Did the past six months change them in any meaningful way? It is impossible to know, but the interpersonal drama would have definitely felt more immediate if we knew the answer to that question.

The finale is also incredibly jarring because it requires a degree of fast editing and camera placement that the film hadn’t utilized before the third act. It isn’t to the same level of abject ruination as the final minutes of THE LAST BROADCAST, but because the rest of the film is so married to the use of dozens of DV cameras staged at oblique angles, having a finale where a lot of shots are from cameras clearly not staged for a webshow but instead staged for a generic film finale, well... It breaks the illusion at the time when the film needed to sell that illusion the most. It’s not a total abandonment of the aesthetic (unlike THE LAST BROADCAST), but it is enough of a deviation to be distracting.

Thankfully, the acting on display is completely naturalistic and convincing. The small cast is uniformly fine (except for Bradley Cooper; that guy is never going to go anywhere), and the use of silence, camera whirs, mechanical zooms, creaking floorboards, and gentle winds creates a soundscape that is pure goosebump-inducing joy. There is a lot to love in MY LITTLE EYE. But has it aged well? Honestly, yes. It does feel like stepping back into the past, but no more than watching any movie made to capitalize on and/or critique a past trend. It's smart, creepy, and intensely focused.