When you say “blind home invasion thriller” today, the first thought is Fede Álvarez’s deranged villains-as-victims shocker Don’t Breathe (and, to a lesser degree, the widely loathed sequel). But the gold standard (oft ripped off, never equaled) was Terence Young’s masterful 1967 Wait Until Dark, with Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman stalked in her own apartment by burglars.
It’s not just that it’s a great thriller. Its importance as a film is that it really weaves the lead character’s disability into the script, in a way that arguably wasn’t equaled in the subgenre until Mike Flanagan wrote a deaf heroine for Hush.
It would be surprising if Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue, writers of See for Me, were unaware of the Hepburn crime classic, which would raise the question of why they’d bother following in such familiar footsteps. Their answer, and a good reason for why their story is so effective, is that they lean into one ubiquitous development from which many filmmakers still flinch: the mobile phone.
See for Me has an extremely simple setup: An embittered former competitive skier, Sophie (Davenport) scrapes by a living petsitting for rich people who couldn’t possibly believe that a blind woman could be up to no good in their house. Of course, she ends up in the wrong home, one targeted by a trio of robbers with a hidden safe on their mind and a mysterious voice at the end of the line manipulating their actions. And this is where Yorke and Gushue insert their innovation. Even though it’s all set in the classic remote and isolated country retreat in the middle of winter, they build cellphone technology into the storyline. It’s a running joke now that scriptwriters are still desperate to sever the signal as fast as possible, and See for Me gives them exactly that easy setup. Instead, Sophie has a connection to assistance: “See for Me,” an app that connects her, via her cellphone camera, to a bored gamer, Kelly (Kennedy), who makes some cash reading milk carton expiration dates to blind people via video. So helping Sophie evade murderous thieves is not quite what she signed up for.
Whereas Wait Until Dark depends upon the idea of the innocent Susy stumbling through the darkness until she finds her inner strength (Hepburn knowingly playing against type there), See for Me adds edge to both Sophie and to Kelly, who seems a little eager to encourage her app buddy to pick up a gun and start fighting back. It’s not a radical reinvention, but a smart updating captured with an icy thrill by cinematographers Jordan Oram (Spiral) and Jackson Parrell (Slasher), and given tension and urgency from a throbbing darkwave score by the Level 16 duo of Joseph Murray and Lodewijk Vos. See for Me is definitely worth watching yourself.
This article appears in January 7 • 2022.
