Delayed Reaction: In Your Eyes

The Pitch: It's like if Being John Malkovich worked both ways.

A man and woman are able to see what the other is seeing and communicate from across the country.

I didn't know it was possible to be this unimpressed by a Joss Whedon script, especially from this late in his career (2014). I've never been one of Whedon's obsessive fans, but I do appreciate his inventiveness and skill with dialogue. On paper, that makes In Your Eyes a slam dunk. Most of the story is driven by this high concept and the two characters conversing. I'll be honest though. When I saw this film, I didn't even realize Whedon was involved. After The Big Sick and more recently What If, I was looking for something else with Zoe Kazan. It was only when looking some things up about the film afterward that I noticed the Whedon connection.

Boy, I was not impressed by this film. I can forgive a thin high-concept - I adore AboutTime and that premise barely makes sense - as long as it's in service of something worthwhile. The problem is, I just didn't care about the central relationship between the mentally linked couple. They were duds and I don't know if the blame belongs to Whedon's script, the execution of the director, or the incompatibility of the leads. Something wasn't right and the rest of the film fell apart because of it.

It doesn't help that this has the production value or a Hallmark movie, and the insane asylum part is a level of high drama that took me out of the story even more. It honestly felt like Whedon wrote this as a challenge - a lot of screenwriters have stacks of unpublished screenplays they wrote to either get something out of their system or try something out that never get made [for good reason] - and then he didn't object when someone said "I'd like to see if I can do anything with this". I wouldn't be shocked if it started as his screenplay and was butchered by the production, direction, and editing along the way until nothing good was left. What I'm trying to say is that I want to believe that Joss Whedon is better than this.

As I mentioned though, I saw this for Zoe Kazan. I'm still trying to form an opinion of her. So far, I've determined that she's good in RomComs, which increases my curiosity to see Ruby Sparks. For her sake, I'm going to forget she was in this. It was one of her "Might at well" movies, not a "this will make me a star" movie.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend