Eye for an Eye Review: Florida Gothic Done Right

Tragedy sends teen Anna from Brooklyn into the humid, heavy air of a small Florida town. Her new home is with her grandmother, May, a woman who navigates the old house from memory, having been blind for decades. The isolation is immediate and palpable.

The bayou itself, with its hanging branches and thick stillness, seems to hold secrets. A sense of place is a difficult thing for a film to earn, but here, the Southern Gothic atmosphere is not just window dressing; it is an active presence.

Anna’s grief makes her an outsider, a ghost in her own new life, drifting through a community where local folklore feels less like history and more like a waiting threat. The air is thick with things unsaid, both in the family home and in the town itself.

The Rules of Retribution

The town’s threatening folklore has a name: Mr. Sandman. This is not a creature of random malice but an agent of a specific, brutal justice. The legend says he can be summoned to punish bullies. His methods are direct and nightmarish. He invades the dreams of his targets and tears out their eyes.

The film sets its narrative engine running with a simple, ugly act. Anna, desperate for connection, falls in with two local teens, Shawn and Julie. When Shawn violently attacks a smaller boy, Anna watches, frozen. She does not participate, but she does not intervene. This distinction is the key to the film’s entire mechanism.

The victim is taught how to call the Sandman, and his list of targets includes not only the perpetrator, Shawn, but also the two silent witnesses. The story structure is clear: this is not about a monster hunting the innocent, but about a curse that punishes action and inaction alike, placing the protagonist in a difficult moral position from the start.

The Texture of a Nightmare

Director Colin Tilley’s extensive work in music videos is evident in every frame. The film operates with a stylized confidence, building its horror not from sudden shocks but from a sustained, eerie mood. The nightmare sequences are the film’s strongest asset, skillfully avoiding the trap of overly literal dream logic.

Instead, they are visceral and bizarrely incoherent, much like real dreams. Black ooze drips from walls, a photograph’s subject shifts with a turn of the head, a person in a rabbit costume appears without reason. These images are designed for subconscious effect. The creature itself is a triumph of design, a tall, quiet humanoid that feels like a classic monster effect.

The film even pauses its primary narrative for a stark stop-motion animation sequence that explains the Sandman’s tragic origin. This is a work built on the strength of its unsettling imagery, trusting the audience to feel the dread rather than just react to it.

The Calculus of Guilt

The performances give weight to the story’s central ideas. Whitney Peak as Anna offers a quiet, physical portrayal of a teen wrestling with fear and responsibility. Her trauma is felt in her posture and her silences.

As the matriarchs with a dark history, S. Epatha Merkerson and Golda Rosheuvel ground the supernatural events in a believable family dynamic of resentment. The film’s primary interest lies in its exploration of punishment. It constructs a moral gray area around Anna. Her crime is passivity. The narrative asks if she merits the same torment as the person who committed the violence.

By making its protagonist guilty of inaction, the film creates a difficult question about accountability. The horror becomes personal, tied directly to the choices each character makes or fails to make. It is a story about the price of silence.

Eye for an Eye reached U.S. screens on June 20 2025, opening in select theaters and day-and-date digital through Vertical; rental and purchase options are live on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, and Vudu, while Letterboxd logs the same-day digital window for American viewers and a UK–Ireland debut on July 14.

Full Credits

Director: Colin Tilley

Writers: Elisa Victoria, Michael Tully

Producers and Executive Producers: Tim Headington, Theresa Steele Page, Rachael Fung, Nate Kamiya, David Darby, Lauren Shelton, Elisa Victoria, Susan Kirr

Cast: Whitney Peak, S. Epatha Merkerson, Golda Rosheuvel, Finn Bennett, Laken Giles, Michika McClinton, Carson Minniear, Oliver J Green

Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Robert Leitzell

Editors: James Vandewater

Composer: Timothy Williams