See for Me

I found this when it popped up on Shudder and the description intrigued me. A blind woman, caught in a home invasion, has to rely on an app with an Army vet at the other end to see for her. Sure, it sounds kind of derivative of Hush, but Hush was excellent. I thought blindness instead of deafness would be a different twist. It turns out See For Me is more than that, by far. Not necessarily better, but it's not as simple as swapping the disability. Hush was more of a siege movie, with a lunatic murderer on the outside, and a deaf woman on the inside trying to survive. This is a trio of burglars and a home invasion gone awry, but it's more than that. The main character, Sophie, has fairly recently lost her sight; she was once an Olympic hopeful in downhill skiing, but losing her sight took that away. She's now bitter and resentful. She doesn't want people to do anything for her. She has been stealing from people she house-sits for and selling what she steals. It gives her character some depth, and adds to the movie to make it more than "blind girl somehow outwits burglars", as she has to accept that her disability both affords her some social advantages, but also puts her at obvious disadvantages, and that asking for help is not a sign of weakness but acknowledgement of reality. Skyler Davenport, who plays Sophie, does a marvelous job giving Sophie the layers the character needs for the story; you'll cheer Sophie on, curse her for making selfish and stupid decisions, but also sympathize with her. Sophie is the cornerstone of this movie, but that's not to say it's a one-person show. Jessica Parker Kennedy plays Kelly, a vet on desk duty who is a sighted helper in an app called See For Me. Kelly doesn't get quite as much complexity as Sophie does, but there is enough shading to know Kelly is a good person who may have done a bad thing, and is trying to atone for it with her work with the app. I really enjoyed how, even when Sophie was hostile and bitter at asking for help, Kelly didn't take it personally. Unfortunately, the burglars don't get any color whatsoever. They're burglars, and hired hands for someone else at that. One is older, one is the guy breaking into the safe, and the third is a bit of a loose cannon. That's really all you get from them. It isn't their movie, sure, so they don't need a whole lot of depth, but it would've been nice to give them a little bit. The identity of the mastermind is never in doubt, and he is equally as simplistically drawn. The other downside of the movie is the house itself. It is a huge, sprawling rural mansion. Too sprawling, in fact, as the layout is so large and confusing, I can't imagine anyone watching will get a sense of the geography of it. That's important, because without knowing where Sophie is in relation to the burglar looking for her, it breaks the tension. Are they in the next room? A different floor? The other side of the house? No idea. I have seen some criticism of the movie being fairly trope-heavy and a standard-issue thriller, and I can't dispute that. But what I can say is that not every movie needs to reinvent the wheel. A well-done movie is a well-done movie, no matter how many shop-worn cliches it uses, and See For Me, to me, did its job well. It's got good twists and turns, it has a complex main character, and it knows when to be tense and when to let you breathe. I got exactly what I wanted out of it; a good time.