Ever since The Crying Game, I’ve been faced with the occasional problem of writing adequately about a film which contains an element of surprise. That is to say, an unexpected element of surprise, as opposed to the oxymoronically expected surprises you get in most horror films. The mere fact of telling you, the reader, that, say, The Sixth Sense has a twist you probably won’t see coming is likely to diminish your enjoyment of the movie: You’ll be looking for it, watching the film in a way you otherwise wouldn’t. I’m not entirely sure that holds for The Life Before Her Eyes, adapted from a novel by Laura Kasischke and directed by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog). The film follows the same character at two points 15 years apart in her life. The adult Diana McFee (Uma Thurman) lives a comfortable life in the affluent Connecticut town where she grew up. She has a husband and a daughter, and teaches art at a community college. But she is haunted by the memory of a day when she was in high school (at which age she is played by Evan Rachel Wood), when a boy she knew brought a gun to school and started firing on his classmates. Unlike such movies as The Swimming Pool or that literary classic of the unreliable narrator, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Aykroyd, I suspect that we’re supposed to realize at some point that things here are not quite as they seem. You might not immediately notice anything wrong, but as the movie picks up speed the clues become impossible to ignore, albeit some subtler than others. (Aficionados of Lewis Carroll or the Zombies may have a jump on the rest of the audience.) As a fan of this kind of movie, I found it elegant and involving, and was surprised to see how poorly a lot of other reviewers rated it. Many of them seem to be reacting to what they read as a moral judgment the film is making, a possible interpretation but one that if true is awfully heavyhanded. See it for yourself and make up your own mind.

—m. faust