Critic Reviews

The standout element of Evil Eye, however, is a riveting star turn from veteran Sarita Choudhury as a superstitious mother whose concern for her daughter spirals into a violent nightmare as past lives pierce the present.

Choudhury is excellent here as a fraught matriarch — as good as she was as a young rebel three decades back. And Maskati’s performance is a slippery mix of suave and menacing, which helps sell the farthest-fetched elements of this story.

Toxic behavior is eternal, and Evil Eye sincerely depicts both those who do not recognize it, and those who are all too familiar with it.

A small but neatly formed horror oddity that prises suspense out of a familiar parental worry: is the person my child has fallen in love with who they say they are?

Evil Eye packs plenty of compelling cultural specificity inside its frames, it never attempts to dig any deeper into the wider world of that stuff that would scare anyone.

Evil Eye is a feast of timidly undeveloped raw material.

There’s a faint, unfortunate whiff of Tyler Perry melodrama to the deadly dull Evil Eye.

With scant visual bite, perhaps it should’ve been called Evil Ear.

Evil Eye deserves acknowledgment for taking a supernatural approach that involves cultures beyond Western trappings (there are countless horror movies that use American-centric Catholicism as their guide, for instance), but that’s about the only positive thing I can say here.