Tribeca 2021 Review: Randall Okita’s SEE FOR ME turns the tables on everyone – us included – in home invasion thriller
Combining elements of Neveldine/Taylor’s Gamer with a reverse Don’t Breathe, Randall Okita’s See for Me puts the audience squarely on the side of a surprisingly skilled blind woman who finds herself on the receiving end of a home invasion. But the home isn’t her own, and she’s not as innocent as she seems. And her skills are augmented by a gifted gamer, who guides her as if through a first-person shooter using an app. So long as the phone’s power holds out, that is.
Blind former skiing champ Sophie (Skyler Davenport) makes a living as a house-sitter, but even when wealthy families compensate her handsomely, she augments it with the occasional theft. After all, people are frequently so patronizing about her disability, assuming her to be far less capable than she is, that nobody would suspect her of actual subterfuge. But when she takes a job at a secluded mountain home, she’s not the only person who plans to make off with a little something. A team of three burglars, each of whom represents a different level of threat, somehow know there’s a loaded safe hidden in the main living room. And they certainly didn’t plan on anyone else being in the house.
Davenport, who identifies as nonbinary, is actually blind – and a stroke survivor! — in real life. So when they’re portraying Sophie as learning how to adapt to a dangerous situation, it’s the opposite of when someone like Al Pacino or Jared Leto plays blind. Instead of learning how to act blind, they have to play less skilled at being so than they actually are. Due to the nature of the film’s central gimmick of a phone app assisting Sophie through a dark house, Davenport is also frequently responsible for their own lighting, with the handheld cell phone being the primary source of it. After watching this, nobody had better make any jokes about bad cinematographers being blind. While the star probably got vocal instructions, they never miss the mark.
Though the lower resolution of my digital screener led to some of the black levels disappearing into pixels, it’s a testament to the cinematography that all the action and scene geography remains clear and comprehensible. The phone footage, meanwhile, blown up large on the home screen of online ally Kelly (The Flash‘s Jessica Parker Kennedy) efficiently replicates in real life the games that inspired it. Playing a military veteran who’s also an expert gamer, Kennedy provides an effective and equally morally flexible foil for Sophie, shattering multiple stereotypes in one role. Anyone who followed the whole faux-”ethics in videogame reviewing” controversy ginned up by the alt-right to recruit dateless misogynists into Breitbart fandom, and the MAGA movement, will no doubt take some escapist pleasure in watching Kelly and Sophie team up to weaponize stereotypes of their helplessness, while taking out vicious, insecure men full of excuses and self-justification. Kim Coates is particularly effective as the ringleader, mostly conveying menace only as the distant voice emanating from a phone.
But See for Me is no simple “good women versus bad men” escapist shoot ’em up. Sophie is a pragmatist above all else, and will switch sides however many times it takes in order to stay alive. Okita, along with writers Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue, not only look to shatter stereotypes about the disabled as they relate to their abilities, but also their perceived nobility. They’re not afraid to have their heroes be seriously flawed, in ways that major studio executives would probably insist on sanding off.
In the process, they’ve created a premise that could potentially become a franchise. But as far as how that goes, we will have to see for ourselves.
