Critics reviews

[Open Your Eyes] is a delightfully tense and accomplished sci-fi that has great fun playing around with levels of reality. And it all comes with a delicious 90s aesthetic... Everything is a perfect capsule of the time; a snapshot of what was cool and what was nerdy.

What holds us through the revelations are the sheer chutzpah with which Amenábar and his cast deliver them, the emotional imperative of the material and the fascinating way it touches on concepts of interior/exterior worth, personal responsibility and phenomenology. [Open Your Eyes] is so smart, mischievous and stylish, you'll instantly want to see it again.

Amenábar's maddening existential thriller Open Your Eyes persistently undermines conventional notions of time, setting, and personal identity. To what end remains similarly ambiguous, but as an especially severe case of millennial anxiety, the film is nonetheless an intriguing (if unsolvable) puzzle.

[Open Your Eyes] is one of the most thought-provoking thrillers of recent years, a film that really does challenge its audience's expectations and suppositions at every turn... Amenábar's labyrinthine puzzler is a stunning movie that'll keep you guessing right until the very last minute... and scratching your head all the way home.

[Open Your Eyes] teases and perplexes more than it actually provokes... The pre-millenium tension is all over the film’s riveting final scene, though everything prior feels like a preposterous conundrum leading to an inevitable punchline.

The audacity of Open Your Eyes matches its imagination. Sadly, it goes too far and you are left with the thought, "If nothing is as it seems and nothing seems what it is, where are you?" ...Despite a sneaky suspicion that it's all a load of codswallop, Amenabar has an energy and a style that is definitely seductive.

[Open Your Eyes] is a workmanlike film, with similarities to Bunuel and Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face. But it never quite comes to life, and its far-from-unexpected dénouement reveals a resemblance to a certain American blockbuster widely available on DVD, but which - to be fair - it pre-dates by at least a year.

To say that this is a “thriller” hardly does Amenábar or his cast justice; Open Your Eyes is a brilliant puzzlebox caught on celluloid, beautiful to look at but difficult to figure out. Amenábar combines elements of science fiction, horror, and German Expressionism with the more traditional elements of a love story and Hitchcockian “wrong man” turns, and then somehow manages to make it all fit into a skewed sort of logic.

In its deliberately vexing way, ''Open Your Eyes'' is a film with enough intellectual meat on its stylish bones to give more adventurous moviegoers something to chew on afterward.

Ambitiously complex, disturbing and terrific-looking... [Open Your Eyes] just barely sidesteps art-school pretentiousness... It is a Faust-inspired look at the depth of our vanity in a millennial culture that makes us believe we can buy who we want to be.