There is something feral in the water down in Australia right now. One genre banger after another keeps surfacing, and Dead Eyes is yet another reminder that the Aussies understand how to make horror feel mean, immediate, and deeply uncomfortable.
Premiering at SXSW, Richard E. Williams’ Dead Eyes wastes absolutely no time getting weird. The film drops you straight into the deep end, no hand-holding, no warm-up lap, just instant immersion. From the opening moments, it commits fully to its first-person POV gimmick, and crucially, it actually understands how to use it.
The entire film unfolds through the eyes of Sean, played by Rijen Laine, who is searching the Australian bush for his missing father. He is joined by his fiancée, Grace, portrayed by Ana Thu Nguyen, their terminally annoying friend Eric, played by Charles Cottier, and Eric’s girlfriend Kate, played by Alea O’Shea. The setup is refreshingly simple, and the runtime is tight, which means there is zero room for filler. The movie moves fast, almost aggressively so, and for the most part, that works in its favor.
If you are a fan of found footage or first-person survival horror video games, Dead Eyes feels like catnip. The whole thing plays like one long, uninterrupted video game cutscene. I was genuinely ready to grab a controller at multiple points. It has that specific dread that comes from being locked inside a character’s perspective, where you can see danger coming but have no control over stopping it.
The score is used perfectly, amplifying tension without ever overpowering the image, and the sound design as a whole is rock solid. Whispers float through the trees, footsteps echo just out of sight, and the forest itself feels alive in a hostile, watchful way. There are some genuinely excellent jump scares here too, sharp and well-timed, not the lazy kind that rely solely on loud noise.
Visually, the film is ambitious and consistently interesting. Williams and cinematographer Julian Panetta make great use of the bush, letting fog, darkness, and negative space do a lot of the work. The editing is especially clever, with smooth transitions from scene to scene and night to day that keep the momentum strong and the geography disorienting in the best way. There is one sequence involving a watcher lurking in the distance that is particularly striking and unsettling.
Then there is the mushroom sequence. At one point, our POV is tripping hard, and the film fully leans into it. The image warps, the environment breathes, and reality feels unstable. Everything bends and shifts just enough to make you uneasy without going full digital soup. It is one of the most effective uses of altered perspective in a recent horror film and fits the POV conceit perfectly.
Where Dead Eyes starts to stumble a bit is in its ambition. There are a lot of ideas packed into an 81-minute runtime, and not all of them get the room they need. The film becomes slightly convoluted in the third act, and it begins to feel longer than it actually is. Some of the humor does not land, which may come down to cultural differences, as a few jokes feel distinctly not aimed at an American audience.
The practical effects and makeup are mostly strong. There is enough goo, grime, and tactile grossness to make even seasoned horror fans squirm. That said, a few effects late in the film feel a little undercooked compared to what came before, though not enough to ruin the overall experience.
Rijen Laine deserves special credit here. Because we rarely see his face, his performance will likely be overlooked. But he carries the entire film through physicality, breath, panic, and exhaustion. The emotional weight of Sean’s trauma comes through despite the visual limitations, and that is not an easy feat.
Ultimately, Dead Eyes does not reinvent the wheel, but it sharpens it. It is fast, nasty, atmospheric, and fully committed to its POV conceit. Some things work, some things do not, but it is impossible to deny that this is a fun, relentless ride. It feels like a modern cousin to The Blair Witch Project, filtered through the language of video games and contemporary survival horror.
Messy at times, exhilarating at others, Dead Eyes is one of the more uniquely crafted horror films to come out of SXSW in recent years. Even when it bites off more than it can chew, it never stops swinging.
Jessie Hobson