All sorts of clues are scattered throughout “The Life Before Her Eyes,” a trick flick disguised as a chick flick.
The movie exists in two periods: senior year at high school, which we know from the start will climax in a Columbine-like mass shooting, and 15 years later, around the time of a commemoration of that grisly event.
We follow one character through both periods. As a teen (played by Evan Rachel Wood, fine and focused here as usual), Diana is a wild child, a contrast to her straight-laced best friend Maureen (Eva Amurri, the engaging daughter of Susan Sarandon).
As a grown-up (now played by Uma Thurman), Diana floats in a haze, still haunted by her fateful encounter on the day of the shooting. She has her own daughter, also rebellious, and a husband she evidently met in high school.
The film keeps returning to the day of the shooting, as Diana and Maureen are trapped in a bathroom by the gunman. The outcome of this moment is withheld until the end of the movie, an initially intriguing device that eventually begins to feel awfully manipulative.
“The Life Before Her Eyes” is based on a novel by Laura Kasischke, directed by Vadim Perelman, whose work here is just as sober as it was in “House of Sand and Fog.” Perelman is a fussy filmmaker, and he fills this movie with a lot of recurring details: spraying water, crawling animals, and the song “She’s Not There.”
If you can sift these clues and guess the outcome of this story in advance, maybe it will make it more compelling to sit through. I have to admit I didn’t, so a lot of the movie felt like treading water.
And reflecting on the movie afterward, the concept of it feels even more engineered and empty than when you’re watching it. Certain key information is held from us in order to create implications that turn out to be bogus. Given the movie’s pretensions toward seriousness, this is string-yanking of the most mechanical kind.
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