Still haunted by the past

“The Life Before Her Eyes,” from director Vadim Perelman (“The House of Sand and Fog”), is adapted from a well-regarded novel by Laura Kasischke. The movie has its good points too, notably an eerily mesmerizing performance by Evan Rachel Wood. But there’s an airtight quality to the movie, an off-kilter contemporary gothic complete with weird nuns, writhing Pentecostals and a disaffected high school kid with a semiautomatic weapon, that makes it feel like a formal exercise. Though atmospheric and occasionally suspenseful, its gimmickry keeps it from being transcendent.

High school best friends Diana (Wood) and Maureen (Eva Amurri) pop into the bathroom before class one day and suddenly hear gunfire and screaming outside the door. Moments later, the gunman, a fellow classmate, bursts in and demands that the girls choose which one of them will get to live. The friends cry, plead for their lives, hesitate, and the next thing we know, a 40-year-old Diana (Uma Thurman) is waking up from another restless night. Maureen, you assume, is long dead.

An anxious suburban housewife, Diana is nothing like the spirited high school girl we’ve seen in previous scenes. Married to a college professor, whom she appears to have met and fallen in love with while still in high school, and mother to a mischievous 8-year-old named Emma (Gabrielle Brennan), Diana is edgy, insecure, disoriented and increasingly nervous despite having clicked into a seemingly idyllic life. She lives in a sprawling old house and teaches art history at a community college but a nightmarish pall hangs over her life.

As the movie cuts between Diana as a rebellious teenager and Diana as a timid adult, the sense that something is not quite right with her grows. Clearly suffering from some kind of survivor’s guilt, she seems unable to separate her past from her present, both of which have the quality of dreams thanks to Pawel Edelman’s eerily beautiful camera work. The restlessness of her youth seems to have turned into a constant searching in adulthood, and it’s a recurring motif in the adult Diana’s life that she always seems to be looking for someone -- her daughter, her student, her husband.

Beautifully constructed and shot, the movie builds toward its unexpected, if not exactly mind-blowing conclusion, but though it hints at some interesting thematic elements, Perelman doesn’t delve into them very deeply. You get the feeling that somewhere in the source material, there are all sorts of meditations on women’s assigned roles in life. But Perelman doesn’t quite get close enough to his characters for their predicaments to fully resonate.

--

[email protected]

--

“The Life Before Her Eyes.” MPAA rating: R for violent and disturbing content, language and brief drug use. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes. In limited release.