i see you movie review guardian

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

I See You review – horror and heartbreak in the new South Africa

Royal Court Upstairs, London Playwright Mongiwekhaya’s post-apartheid tale of erased histories and frustrated dreams is beautifully acted and grips like a thriller

W hat’s in a name? A great deal in this play by South African writer Mongiwekhaya, produced with the Market Theatre of Johannesburg. It’s directed with a restrained punchy power by Noma Dumezweni , who recently stepped into the breach at this address in Linda and will shortly be playing Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in the West End.

In a South Africa that is dancing to new beats, a lively Friday night is about to turn bad when black law student Ben meets a young white woman who calls herself Skinn. Driving away from a bar together they are pulled over by a policeman, Buthelezi, and his colleague. Buthelezi is a former freedom fighter, disappointed that post-apartheid South Africa hasn’t turned out to the land he dreamed about, and furious that his wife has a restraining order against him. Ben, with his western name and an inability to speak any African language, soon becomes the butt of Buthelezi’s rage. He is determined to make Ben dance to another tune. Particularly when Skinn, speaking Afrikaans, attempts to intervene with a bribe.

Mongiwekhaya’s script has some plotting issues – not least that Ben never tries to summon help on his phone – but it paints a grim portrait of a society in which the abused turn abusers and everyone turns a blind eye to violence. The staging implicates us. The personal is highly political in a play that beneath its thriller-like structure explores complex issues of histories erased, languages lost and what it feels like when you no longer have a place you can call home.

Some of the characters are sketchily drawn and the symmetries of personal relationships too obviously highlighted. But it’s gripping and beautifully acted, with Desmond Dube horrifying and heartbreaking as Buthelezi, a man who wants others to remember their history even as he is destroyed by his own past.

• South Africa

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

Film Review: ‘I See You’

Small-town child disappearances intersect with one family's domestic woes in this eerie, surprising thriller.

By Dennis Harvey

Dennis Harvey

Film Critic

• ‘The Bones’ Review: It’s Paleontologists vs. Profit in Entertaining Look at the Fossil Trade 2 weeks ago
• ‘5lbs of Pressure’ Review: Forgiveness Comes Hard for an Ex-Con in This Unconvincing Crime Drama 4 weeks ago
• ‘Stopmotion’ Review: Art Infects Rather Than Imitates Life in IFC’s Partly Animated Creepshow 1 month ago

The fact that it’s a very complicated matter even identifying the “I” and “you” in “I See You” is just a sample of the narrative tricks in this very tricksy thriller. Working from an impressive first produced screenplay by actor Devon Graye, Adam Randall’s film is an eerie suspense exercise that starts out looking like a supernatural tale — one of several viewer presumptions this cleverly engineered narrative eventually pulls the rug out from under. Saban Films opens it on 10 U.S. screens this Friday, while Paramount is handling concurrent home-formats release. Long-term viability as a streaming offering is assured, while the distinctive plotting may well lure offshore remake bids.

Philipp Blaubach’s probing, restless camera charges the very air with unseen menace from the start, as a 10-year-old boy bicycles home through a picturesque small-town, his progress down a forest trail violently curtailed by some invisible barrier or force. That sense of omnipresent malevolence continues even within the comfortable confines of the Harper home, where TV news reports soon note the aforementioned lad as the latest victim in a disturbing series of local child disappearances.

The atmosphere is already uncomfortable here for other reasons, however: Jackie Harper ( Helen Hunt ) is getting a very cold shoulder from both police-detective husband Greg (Jon Tenney) and teenage son Connor (Judah Lewis) for a transgression we realize after a while is infidelity. She’s very, very sorry, but nobody is in a forgiving mood yet, with Connor particularly incensed. Thus, when a series of odd occurrences commence — an entire drawer of utensils vanishes, family pictures disappear from the wall, etc. — the Harpers assume one another is responsible, or in particular that surly Connor is “acting out.”

Meanwhile Greg and his colleagues (including Gregory Alan Williams and Erika Alexander) investigate the apparent renewal of youth abductions — which is rendered all the more disturbing for the fact that the person assumed responsible for a string of identical prior kidnappings/murders has been in prison for some time now.

As our suspicions grow that something malignant is stalking the Harpers in their own home, things take a turn with a surprise visit from the old flame (Sam Trammell) Jackie strayed with, and whom she now desperately wishes would go away. His arrival seems to spike the inexplicable domestic phenomena, fast turning one crisis into a worse one. But at around the 45-minute mark, “I See You” abruptly rewinds, replaying previously-seen events from the perspective of new characters played by Owen Teague and Live Barer. We may think their introduction definitively turns this from one kind of story into another. But, in fact, scenarist Graye isn’t finished upending our assumptions yet.

After his narrative strings are finally pulled together in a long, wordless final sequence, you may begin to reflect that the film’s primary separate plot elements aren’t really connected save by happenstance. But the perfect storm their collision creates is handled with such skillful assurance by Randall (“Level Up,” “iBoy”) that the proceedings never seen overly contrived or hyperbolic, as they easily might have. It’s a story with much disturbing content that nonetheless largely avoids explicit violence. Expectations are subverted on other levels as well — for instance, in the way that top-billed Hunt starts out as our primary viewpoint, yet her character gradually grows less and less central to what’s really going on.

Strong performances down the line provide psychological credibility to an astute overall package that manages to eke considerable sinister atmosphere from any number of perfectly pleasant locations in the greater Cleveland, Ohio area. A particular plus is William Arcane’s unsettling score.

Reviewed online, San Francisco, Dec. 3, 2019. (Also in SXSW Film Festival.) MPAA rating: R. Running time: 98 MIN.

• Production: A Saban Films release of a Bankside Films presentation in association with Head Gear Films, Metrol Technology, Kreo Films, Quickfire Films, Zodiac Holdings of a Zodiac Features production. Producer: Matt Waldeck. Executive producers: Ben Hecht, Stephen Kelliher, Phil Hunt, Compton Ross, James Atherton, Jan Pace, Robert Ruggeri, Mark Hamer, Dave McClean, Viviana Zarragoitia, Eric Fischer, Bill Schultz, Jordan Bayer, Matt Leipzig, Chris Sablan.
• Crew: Director: Adam Randall. Screenplay: Devon Graye. Camera (color, widescreen, HD): Philipp Blaubach. Editor: Jeff Castelluccio. Music: William Arcane.
• With: Helen Hunt, Jon Tenney, Judah Lewis, Owen Teague, Libe Barer, Greg Alan Williams, Erika Alexander, Allison King.

More From Our Brands

Global citizen festival will return to central park great lawn after substantial rain damage, 10 pairs of leather sneakers you can wear with almost anything, march madness exile pepperdine makes the most as tourney host, the best loofahs and body scrubbers, according to dermatologists, twd: the ones who live star unpacks finale’s near-misses, killing off [spoiler] and that emotional ending, verify it's you, please log in.

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Love Lies Bleeding Link to Love Lies Bleeding
• Problemista Link to Problemista
• Late Night with the Devil Link to Late Night with the Devil

New TV Tonight

• Mary & George: Season 1
• Star Trek: Discovery: Season 5
• Sugar: Season 1
• American Horror Story: Season 12
• Parish: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• Loot: Season 2
• Lopez vs Lopez: Season 2
• The Magic Prank Show With Justin Willman: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• We Were the Lucky Ones: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• A Gentleman in Moscow: Season 1
• X-Men '97: Season 1
• The Gentlemen: Season 1
• Palm Royale: Season 1
• Invincible: Season 2
• Quiet on Set:The Dark Side of Kids TV: Season 1
• American Rust: Season 2
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Steve! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces Link to Steve! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

Box Office 2024: Top 10 Movies of the Year

MonsterVerse Movies and Series Ranked: Godzilla, Kong, Monarch by Tomatometer

Women’s History

Awards Tour

The Rotten Tomatoes Channel: Watch on Samsung, Roku, And More

The Visibility Dilemma

• Trending on RT
• Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire
• 3 Body Problem
• Play Movie Trivia

2019, Mystery & thriller, 1h 36m

What to know

Critics Consensus

I See You gets tripped up on its own narrative contortions, but a solid cast and an effective blend of scares and suspense make this slow-building mystery worth watching. Read critic reviews

You might also like

Where to watch i see you.

Rent I See You on Vudu, Apple TV, or buy it on Vudu, Apple TV.

Rate And Review

Super Reviewer

Rate this movie

Oof, that was Rotten.

Meh, it passed the time.

It’s good – I’d recommend it.

So Fresh: Absolute Must See!

What did you think of the movie? (optional)

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

Step 2 of 2

How did you buy your ticket?

Let's get your review verified..

AMCTheatres.com or AMC App New

Cinemark Coming Soon

We won’t be able to verify your ticket today, but it’s great to know for the future.

Regal Coming Soon

Theater box office or somewhere else

By opting to have your ticket verified for this movie, you are allowing us to check the email address associated with your Rotten Tomatoes account against an email address associated with a Fandango ticket purchase for the same movie.

You're almost there! Just confirm how you got your ticket.

I see you videos, i see you   photos.

Strange occurrences plague a small-town detective and his family as he investigates the disappearance of a boy.

Rating: R (Violence and Language)

Genre: Mystery & thriller

Original Language: English

Director: Adam Randall

Producer: Matt Waldeck

Writer: Devon Graye

Release Date (Theaters): Dec 6, 2019  limited

Release Date (Streaming): Dec 5, 2019

Runtime: 1h 36m

Distributor: Saban Films

Production Co: Head Gear Films, Kreo Films FZ

Cast & Crew

Jackie Harper

Greg Harper

Judah Lewis

Connor Harper

Owen Teague

Gregory Alan Williams

Allison Gabriel

Officer Grace Caleb

Jennifer Grace

Window Repairman

Adam Randall

Devon Graye

Matt Waldeck

James Atherton

Executive Producer

Jordan Bayer

Eric Fischer

Mark Andrew Hamer

Philipp Blaubach

Cinematographer

Jeff Castelluccio

Film Editing

Carmen Navis

Production Design

Geza Kassai

Art Director

Grace Smith

Set Decoration

Nancy Collini

Costume Design

Nancy Nayor

News & Interviews for I See You

Dark Waters Is Certified Fresh

Critic Reviews for I See You

Audience reviews for i see you.

As thrillers go, I See You manages to take an old formula and still become something surprisingly satisfying. The first half hour of the film is generic build-up material; a family fractured through dishonesty which conveniently allows us to distrust the whole belt and braces of their idilic lifestyle. However, the film takes an interesting twist and what we thought we knew, soon becomes an indictment of our pre-conceived judgements and the film works very well on our assumptions. Alternative timelines are introduced from the individual characters involved and before you know it, you're already questioning yourself. For any thriller of this nature to work, it has to have an Ace up its sleeve and director Adam Randall impressively knows how to play his cards here. What looks like a game of dominoes in the beginning, soon becomes an impressively calculated chess move.

Movie & TV guides

Play Daily Tomato Movie Trivia

Discover What to Watch

Rotten Tomatoes Podcasts

• Entertainment /

I See You is a beautifully crafted puzzle of a horror movie

And it keeps viewers guessing through the final shot.

By Tasha Robinson

Share this story

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases. This review comes from the 2019 SXSW Interactive Festival.

There’s a striking tradition of kid-disappearance movies where a traumatized parent tries to convince authorities that something has happened to their child, but evidence suggests that there was never a child in the first place. A subset of the “Who’s crazy here?” mystery, which plays with the audience’s sense of reality and understanding of a situation, movies like Bunny Lake is Missing , Flightplan , and The Forgotten rely on the audience to empathize with a protagonist who may be creating a mystery and a crisis where there isn’t one.

The narratively complicated mystery I See You plays with expectations and reality in the same way, but it’s startlingly frank about its child disappearance. In the opening scene, a boy biking through the woods is ripped violently into the air by an unseen hand, disappearing offscreen. It’s a memorable opening gambit and seemingly a declaration of a specific tone and intent for the film. But like so many elements in I See You , it establishes expectations that don’t immediately play out in the expected, familiar ways. Writer Devon Graye and director Adam Randall (of Netflix’s iBoy ) use that eerie image of the flying 10-year-old to hook their audience, but the rest of the film is a much more complicated process of playing out their line, then reeling the audience back in. In this film, nothing is exactly what it seems — except when it is, and the audience just doesn’t have the tools to interpret it yet.

What’s the genre?

Horror movie, thriller, domestic drama, murder mystery, police procedural…  I See You teases its way into a number of different genres, and part of the way writer Devon Graye and director Adam Randall keep audiences guessing is by keeping them guessing on the exact nature of what they’re watching.

What’s it about?

When 10-year-old Justin Whitter disappears into the woods, detective Greg Harper (Jon Tenney) and his partner Spitzky (Gregory Alan Williams) are assigned to investigate. A clue left behind links the boy’s kidnapping to a notorious child murderer Spitzky sent to jail 15 years ago, raising the question of whether he convicted the wrong man or if there’s a copycat killer haunting his town. Meanwhile, his wife Jackie (Helen Hunt) is trying to mend fences with him after having an affair, but their teenage son Connor (Judah Lewis) is acting out against her in increasingly vicious ways.

By the time strange things start happening in their home — mundane objects appearing or disappearing, household electronics spontaneously turning on, a smashed window and a window repairman who saw something unexplained — the audience already has an entire laundry list of possible explanations and suspects, enough to create any number of plausible “The filmmakers want us to think X, but it’s probably actually Y” theories. The actual truth is startling, but more importantly, it’s intriguing — the kind of reveal that opens up possibilities, instead of shutting them down.

What’s it really about?

It’s hard to get deeply into what I See You is getting at without giving too much away, but it’s safe to say that, in part, it’s about how startlingly vulnerable people can be, whether they’re facing malicious intentions they may not even be aware of, the unknown in general, or just their need for other people. Hunt, in particular, delivers a painfully raw performance, as she begs her husband for forgiveness that he meets with cold accusations or tries to keep up a brave appearance in the face of her son’s fury. But Tenney also seems vulnerable as he tries to navigate his wife’s betrayal and his suspicions about her, and Lewis gives a strong portrayal of a boy covering up his grief with aggression. There’s a lot of open need in this movie and not much of it being met.

But the film is also arguably about how easy it is for people to only see their expectations instead of the truth, and to overlook important details while they’re living out their own internal dramas. And it could just as easily be described as exploring the ways past trauma does or doesn’t explain or excuse people’s behavior.

Is it good?

I See You isn’t for everyone. The kind of people who walk into a movie expecting a given experience and get furious when, say, Cloverfield or No Country for Old Men or It Comes at Night don’t play out as they imagined, aren’t going to enjoy this movie. Neither are people who love formulaic dramas and can tolerate trailers that confirm every single story beat in a film. Even certain kinds or horror fans, who expect gobs of gore or numbing terror, may come out of it complaining. I See You is tense but only occasionally terrifying. No one’s going to be spreading Hereditary -style advance word about how it’s the scariest thing ever.

But for people who specifically prize meticulous story-craft and the ability to dodge broad genre clichés, I See You is a rare gift. It’s a tension experience that gives way to a long series of narrative surprises and payoffs, some of which viewers may not even realize they were primed to want until they arrive at the moment. This is a project for fans of Memento or Timecrimes , the kind of intricate puzzle-movies where all the pieces fit together with well-tooled precision.

None of that would matter if the dramatic segment were poorly executed. Instead, I See You dodges clichés equally adroitly in terms of directorial style. The score, by first-time film composer William Arcane, is unconventional and startling. (During one post-screening Q&A at SXSW, the filmmakers discussed how Arcane used unconventional instruments to produce the score, including wire clothes hangers. “I think at one point he said he’d got a bone clarinet, and he’d smashed holes in it, and he was making music out of things like that,” music supervisor Will Quiney said.) The cinematography is subdued but crisp, with an emphasis on artfully lit faces, producing an effect that looks more like a family drama than a supernatural horror movie. And the cast helps keep the tone subdued, yet intense.

But above all, I See You relies on its script, which builds up expectations in order to upend them, then uses its new paradigm to create a new set of anticipations. Every time the audience thinks it understands the games being played and tries to get ahead of the film, the story pulls out a new development, all the way up to the film’s final moments. It’s the kind of mystery that feels impossible to predict, even though all the clues are laid out in plain sight.

What should it be rated?

It could pass for PG. I See You is surprisingly short on graphic violence and completely devoid of nudity or sexual situations. There are some adult themes, but apart from the profanity, there’s startlingly little in this movie that couldn’t have played on-screen in the 1940s or ‘50s, when this particular brand of carefully crafted audience-tease was more common. With relatively few changes, this could have played as a double feature with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes , another intricate “What’s the truth here?” mystery that rewards viewers for paying close attention.

How can I actually watch it?

I See You is currently seeking American distribution, so there’s no release date yet, but it seems inevitable that it’ll make it to theaters at some point. Just don’t mistake it for the other 2019 release called I See You (about a vlogger who accidentally captures crimes on camera), or 2016’s I See You (a Bollywood romance about a man in love with an apparent ghost), or 2016’s I See You.com (about a teenager who gets rich by filming his family’s bad behavior and streaming it online). In fact, don’t be hugely surprised if this eventually gets released with a more distinctive title.

An AI voice notes app that really works

20 years of gmail, how the team behind zelda made physics feel like magic, the forerunner 165 series is the budget training watch garmin needed, the t-mobile sidekick’s jump button made mobile multitasking easy.

More from this stream SXSW 2019: all the news, panels, and activations

Girl on the third floor is a skin-crawling horror movie about home improvement, jordan peele’s us turns a political statement into unnerving horror, why the alien-occupation drama captive state isn’t a trump film, the interactive syfy project eleven eleven will make you want to watch the same story six times.