In Your Eyes

In Your Eyes (2014)

A terrific concept—and it unveils early on but if you don't know it it's a great surprise—and a well done movie, too. The key is the two main actors, a young man and a young woman in very different circumstances who seem destined for each other.

And they are 3000 miles apart.

Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of the director) is terrific throughout, playing a well- heeled woman with a controlling husband in beautiful New Hampshire. And Michael Stahl-David plays her counterpart with similar introspective intensity, but as an minor ex-con in a trailer in beautiful New Hampshire. What they have in common is something no one else has—and no one else can know about.

It's the ultimate romance movie in that first sense that you know they belong together and circumstances are keeping them apart. But it's also a romance in a deeper way, because the two get to know each other with extreme openness and intimacy. They naturally fall in love. And the world naturally will not make it easy.

In many ways the filming is quite solid in a familiar way, not drawing attention to itself except in scenes where two realities are made to blend (crudely). This is all about story and more story. Some of the side characters are imperfectly developed (even the controlling husband doesn't always resonate quite right). But the two leads are spot on, and their parallel development is our fascination.