In the vein of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane or Misery, the movie A Closed Book deals with a woman who is mentally torturing a blind man. Daryl Hannah is virtually unrecognizable as the (for whatever reason) unemotional person who has ulterior motives who is hired by a blind author to help him write his autobiography. Hannah looks like a cross between Catherine O'Hare and Loretta Swit, if they were both on Lexapro on bad hair days. Too bad she didn't revamp her role in Kill Bill: that would have been scary. Tom Conti has a few good moments as the blind author, but his character is ultimately a confused mess, at one point highly acute to sounds and smells (even though he's only been blind for a few years), and at the next point completely helpless and stumbling over his own feet. But the most distracting flaw in Conti's character is that he has eyes that don't even exist, with skin that has grown over the sockets like something out of a Twilight Zone episode. Now how can we believe that? Why not just give him empty holes or ghost white eyeballs or something else that is believable? I was looking forward to seeing what Ellen Page had to offer to this film but to my disappointment the actress turned out to be someone named Elaine Paige. Guess I should read the credits more closely. We never find out what happened to the housekeeper and the ending comes out of left field as intensely as a wiffle-ball. There was some real potential here to do some really creepy things and if they had played upon the theme of claustrophobia and the fear of the dark, they might have delivered some tense moments, but unfortunately it turned out to be an average night of off-Broadway theatre.
Review of Blind Revenge
