Tribeca ‘See For Me’ Review: A Predictable Home Invasion Thriller That Works Thanks To Its Cast, Concept And Technology!
Who doesn’t love a good home invasion thriller? Homes are supposed to be a place that you feel the most secure in because the outside is bad. It’s a place you know like the back of your hand, and can navigate it even in your sleep. And if the worst happens, you can probably Home Alone those bad guys to some extent. But what if this happens when you’re not in your own home? And what if it happens to someone who doesn’t have the most crucial sense, the sense of sight? Sure, there’s technology to help the visually impaired, but to what extent can it help them in such a dangerous situation? It makes for quite an interesting premise to begin building a thrilling film, one that director Randall Okita does quite well with See For Me. The thriller premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this month, and stars Skyler Davenport, Jessica Parker Kennedy, Pascal Langdale, Joe Pingue, George Tchortov, Laura Vandervoort and Kim Coates.
See For Me is produced by Matt Code and Kristy Neville, with Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue as screenwriters and James Vandewater as the editor. The film has not one but two cinematographers, Jackson Parrell and Jordan Oram.
What’s See For Me about?
Sophie (Skyler Davenport) is a visually-impaired former skier, who should be on the slopes practicing for the Paralympics. Instead, her mother finds her engaged in something fishy, which causes massive cash payouts deposited in her bank account. Turns out, Sophie has been house-sitting for rich people with pets, and using her ski guide and friend’s assistance on video calls to steal valuables that wouldn’t be missed, since nobody would suspect a blind girl of stealing.
When she is cat-sitting for a recently divorced rich woman in a secluded mansion, she gets locked out in the cold without a key. That’s when she remembers her mother mentioning a new phone app for the visually impaired, called See For Me, that lets someone else be your eyes and see for you through the phone’s camera. Sophie gets paired with army veteran Kelly (Jessica Parker Kennedy) who also plays first-person shooters online, who helps her break in. Little does Sophie know that when three real thieves invade the house that very night to break into a hidden safe, the See For Me app and Kelly will be her only hope to survive. And for Kelly, this is like her ultimate fantasy, a real-life version of the video game she is so good at.
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The film is very well cast, and the actors all do a pretty great job
Right off the bat, the concept of See For Me is pretty fresh and I love that director Randall Okita chose to cast Skyler Davenport (they/them), who is partially visually impaired, for this role. In the filmmaker and cast Q&A, which is a bonus feature for the Tribeca At Home viewers, Skyler talks about how it brought a certain authenticity to their portrayal of Sophie. At the same time, since Sophie is completely visually impaired, Okita had to sometimes tell Skyler if they were reflexively focusing on a particular object in their line of sight too much. The result was that Sophie’s movements through the house, her reactions, everything looked and felt extremely real to see.
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I’ve seen Jessica Parker Kennedy as Nora West-Allen aka XS on The Flash, and liked her. She’s perfect as Kelly, someone who gets super charged up on a mission and can talk someone through it with quick verbal reflexes, because that’s something that her character required to do a lot, that’s how fast things happened. Davenport and Kennedy made a great team and their interactions are written really well.
All the baddies play their parts well, and as the final frontier baddie, Kim Coates does it oh so smoothly. His mannerism bring out that creepy factor, bordering on sadistic, like he is enjoying the cat-and-mouse game, and when he calls out to Sophie, you can feel them chills.
Let’s talk about an important supporting character of the film. That house!
My God, that house! It definitely had a character of its own, which when your film is a home invasion thriller or a horror film set indoors, is exactly what you need. Okita uses the house, which is a real home in Caledon in Ontario, Canada, pretty well, first acquainting us with it through Sophie’s touch and our own eyes when she explores the house during the daytime, when she’s just gotten there. And then, in the night, when the heist is actually happening, we’re actually seeing for Sophie. Only unlike Kelly, we cannot really help her! The limited visibility with the dark and the red light, and the tension thus built makes for an immersive experience that does, on occasion, bring you to the edge of your seat.
See For Me is predictable in parts and I did wish they’d gone a tad more wild with the possibilities
I think there is a very thin line between making a character like Sophie a quick thinker and someone who can take care of her own person, and to make them a superhero, like we’d see in a lot of our Bollywood films where a person with disability is suddenly good at offing baddies. So what I did like about See For Me was that in certain key moments, Sophie must rely on her own brains to save herself, something that people in her situation learn as a survival skill. I mean, look at her, she’s confident enough to go to a place she’s never been to before. That’s brave. And so when she pulls off what she does for most of the film, it is believable.
The writers have also managed to include a very realistic problem with technology here, that of phone batteries dying. It’s usually a tool to render a character helpless, but I think here it ends up empowering Sophie.
That being said, See For Me is quite predictable, and doesn’t exactly blow your mind beyond the idea that a visually impaired person is using technology as a weapon against bad men with guns. Once the novelty of that combo wears off, it’s just a matter of doing it on repeat. I also thought Sophie and Kelly could’ve gotten a chance to team up a little more and do some more challenging things together, because it felt like their two-player game got over too soon. Once Kim Coates enters the gameplay, those few minutes really up the ante, but then the tail end gets a bit too dragged, which I cannot tell you more about, lest I spoil it!
Verdict: Technology > Guns?
Despite being predictable in parts, I did enjoy See For Me as a whole overall experience. Director Randall Okita has a decent home invasion thriller on his hands with a fresh concept that factors in one of the most disruptive things that could both make and break such stories—smartphones and technology. I like how technology is both a constructive force when it is helping Sophie and a force that can be weaponised too when it makes another character vulnerable, while making the ultimate point—we’re super dependent on it and it is now almost a physical extension of ourselves. So does
Watch See For Me for Skyler Davenport’s performance, her team up with Jessica Parker Kennedy, a live action video-game thrill, and that crazy-ass house that has me scared but also makes me want one!
This review is part of our Hauterrfly x Tribeca Film Festival coverage. Read more here!
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