By the end of Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), the phrase has become a chilling incantation.

Science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick may be dead, but he's getting lots of attention in the movies lately. Dick specialized in existential literary acid trips, where reality, memory, and identity were explored, questioned, rewound, looped, spliced, and sometimes exchanged. Christopher Nolan's 2001 film Memento toyed with Dickian themes of the trickiness of memory, personality, and time; Alejandro Amenabar, director of The Others, brings home with his 1997 film Abre Los Ojos, a more directly Dickian fugue on identity and the shifting nature of reality.

Amenabar, a Chilean director-polymath who was born in 1972, writes, directs, and scores his own films. Abre Los Ojos was his second feature; The Others, his third film and his first in English. Both Abre Los Ojos and The Others deal with a main character who is slowly waking to a hidden reality, and while The Others is the more effective and mature film in its handling of the growth of its characters, it lacks the icy power of the total temporal, emotional, and existential discombobulation of the best scenes in Ojos. The Others is frightening as you watch and munch your popcorn, the shocker ending effective but soon forgotten; Abre Los Ojos is more frankly disturbing and unsettling an hour later at the grocery store, under the harsh fluorescent lights, when strangers' faces in the frozen foods section take on a strange and unhealthy unreality you'd prefer not to have been turned on to.

Ojos is part Matrix, part Total Recall, part Fatal Attraction, and like The Crying Game in both its Hitchcockian twists and the fact there's a central key to both movies that one cannot reveal without destroying a newbie's enjoyment. So I'll keep quiet and let the mysteries be, and encourage the curious to visit the Manor Theatre or the Movies @ Birkdale, where the Charlotte Film Society's Second Week Festival features Abre Los Ojos Ojos (and plenty of other enticing films) through January 23.

Cesar (Spanish actor Eduardo Noriega, who really looks a like a rich and sexy young playboy slightly uncomfortable in his own skin), the central figure of Abre Los Ojos, is young, independently wealthy and possesed of big brown eyes and an easy, manipulative charm that land him in many a bedroom. His best friend Pelayo bitches that he doesn't stand a chance with Cesar around, and sure enough Cesar's roving eye falls next on the best friend's girl, Sofia (a winsome Penelope Cruz). Cruz has little to recommend her but innocence, freshness, and near-supernatural beauty, and like David Niven, she always seems to be riffing on herself rather than creating a character out of the whole cloth. But Abre Los Ojos only needs a woman on whom the hero can hang his heart; Sofia is an ideal of female beauty that need only mesmerize and engender obsession by virtue of her appearance. She doesn't have to act, she just has to be what she is -- young and overflowing with dewy animal pulchritude. Eduardo is smitten but still has a emotional debt to pay from an earlier conquest, the maneater Nuria (Najwa Nimri, who excels in portraying both hard-bitten and hurt), with whom he has a less soulful relationship.

Then Amenabar dims the lights and slips something strange in our kool-aid, and we enter a hidden world where time comes out of joint and we no longer know who or what is real, where we are, why we might be there, or even what we really look like. (Those prone to unhealthy philosophical contemplation of the nature of reality might wish to attend showings of this movie under a doctor's care.) Cesar's face becomes disfigured after an accident caused by a vengeful Nuria. Or is he truly disfigured? The scene jumps to what seems to be an interrogation room, where a masked and trembling Cesar cowers from a pacing psychiatrist who insists Cesar has killed someone, and that Cesar's face has been repaired and he is no longer disfigured. We know (or think we know) that Nuria tried to kill Cesar, but who is it Cesar has supposedly killed? Has Cesar's mind shapped? Is he dreaming? Has he been set up by his mysterious "partners", whom he fears are after his fortune? Memory slips, time slips, identity slips, and Cesar's reality yaws, pitches, and sinks, spilling characters and audience alike into an inky, freezing Dickian sea of existential doubt and misery.

A less frightening theme, of how we deal with differing levels of physical attractiveness, is shown with a heavy but effective hand. Just why do we react differently to differing face and body shapes? It's a cold slap to see Cesar's pantherish sexual ease stripped from him utterly, when the only thing that's changed about him is the area between his forehead and his chin. The consequences of "casual" sex (an oxymoron, if you ask me) explored as well, as Cesar's careless actions towards Nuria have an extremely long boom. Abre Los Ojos could even be read as a postmodern fable about the perils of bedhopping and the nasty things that can happen to a sexually promiscuous young man.

Weird snippets that may be clues are hypnotically reiterated. A documentary about cryogenics plays repreatedly in the background of the action. The creepiest alarm in cinema history goes off, eerily repeating "Open your eyes," in a woman's voice, over and over again, until Cesar wakes and slaps it off.

Are you sure that's really you in the mirror, really you reading this review? Are you sure that a science fiction writer or young auteur didn't just dream you up?

Abre los ojos.

Open your eyes.

Jennifer Saylor, January 18, 2002