In a remotely located house, five contestants have agreed to take part on a reality webcast, where they have to spend six months there without anyone leaving. If they manage to do it, they will win $1 million, but if just one of the contestants leaves, everyone loses. All seems fine and exciting, but of course, a lot of tension between the contestants starts to rise after a while. Since they cannot leave the house, they get packages of food, and one day one of these packages contains a letter claiming that one of the contestant’s grandfather has died. And that’s not all: it also includes a gun with five bullets, one for each contestants. One of them, Emma, finds strange messages from someone who might be a person from her past. All kinds of weird things start happening, but they believe it might all be orchestrated by the people running the show, in order to trick them into leaving and thus losing the prize money. None of them have any idea what’s actually going on…
My Little Eye is a British horror film from 2002, directed by Marc Evans, where the plot is of course inspired by the reality TV show Big Brother, and the title refers to the guessing game “I spy (with my little eye)”. Prior to its release it had a test screening of a four-hour version of the film, which was pretty disastrous and all distribution interest died immediately. Eventually, though, the film was cut into less than two hours of playtime, and ended up getting released in theaters. The director was worried that his directing career would go straight into the shitter if this movie flopped, as his previous two films hadn’t fared well. And even though the response to the movie was quite unenthusiastic, it became a surprise sleeper hit. Lucky for Marc!
While Big Brother is apparently still a thing even today, it was quite popular upon the show’s initial release in 1999 and the upcoming years. Thus, My Little Eye was released at a time where pretty much everyone could draw the parallels between the popular reality show and the plot here about the five contestants locked inside a house. The setup is interesting, and it’s offering a claustrophobic and mysterious atmosphere. The tension slowly builds, and while you know something’s wrong you keep wondering what’s actually going on. While never offering any actual scares, there are some pretty effective scenes here and there, especially some of the shots done in night vision which comes off as both creepy and unsettling. The pacing is a bit slow, where you get a lot of character building at first, but this enhances the effect when the mysterious incidents start happening.
Overall, My Little Eye is a solid low-budget thriller with a creepy atmosphere, and well worth checking out.
Director: Marc Evans
Writers: David Hilton, James Watkins
Country & year: UK, US, France, Canada, 2002
Actors: Sean Cw Johnson, Kris Lemche, Stephen O’Reilly, Laura Regan, Jennifer Sky, Bradley Cooper
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280969/
My Little Eye – int trailer from PPC Film on Vimeo.