Open Your Eyes

Despite the poor showing of the X-Files movie, the truth is still out there. At least, so the illusion/reality extravaganzas The Matrix, eXistenZ, and the new Open Your Eyes would have it. This last, by Spanish whiz-kid director Alejandro Amenábar, is the least flashy and visceral of the three -- but also the slickest and most insidiously seductive.

Insufferable César (Eduardo Noriega) has it all: the heir of a restaurant fortune, he's good-looking, has a different babe every night, and is just turning 25. To celebrate he puts a move on Sofia (Penélope Cruz), the girlfriend of his best friend, Pelayo (Fele Martínez), at his birthday party. It proves a fatal mistake, arousing the ire of Nuria (Najwa Nimri), last night's girl and a devil in a red dress and a sportscar. What happens next -- car wreck, facial disfigurement, murder -- is a matter of mystery, with César telling his story to a prison psychiatrist while wearing a mask; and Amenábar has fun mixing up flashbacks, dream sequences, and increasingly uncertain "real"-life passages with ingenious MTVish montages. It doesn't seem to add up (a second viewing is rewarding, though not necessarily clarifying), but at least in Open Your Eyes you care enough about what you see to wonder whether it's real.

-- Peter Keough