Review of Starry Eyes (2014) by Mark M — 24 Feb 2015

With funding raised over Kickstarter and filmed over the course of a mere eighteen days, Starry Eyes is a grim and horrifying tale depicting the pursuit of stardom by the struggling actress Sarah, as she finds herself being eclipsed by others in the same boat that she is in as they attempt to pierce their way through the lower echelons of acting and into stardom. As she begins to audition for a part in an upcoming fictional horror flick called The Silver Scream, Sarah finds herself being given an option to either keep her humanity or to continue with the studio's series of odd, 'gruelling' auditions and letting her humanity slide further away, which culminates in an anything but normal encounter with a producer and the second phase of troubles she undergoes as a result from her craving for fame.

An allegory on fresh actors and actresses in the real world being desperate and naive, and while Sarah's struggle - inwards and outwards - is one that visibly paints the ordeal that she goes through, directors/writers Kölsch and Widmyer fail to expand much on Sarah's motivation as she lunges forward into certain doom other than chalking it up to a rather plain "I want to be famous" reasoning. Being front and center in Starry Eyes, Sarah's acquaintances serve to propel the world in the background, as they exist to allude to the harsh reality of the film industry in Kölsch and Widmyer's love letter to Hollywood. And whom better to capture the starry eyed essence of Sarah than Alexandra Essoe - who herself is a relative newcomer to the film industry - as she firmly plants herself in the pool of actresses to watch out for in the future with the nothing short but magnetic performance that she delivers in Starry Eyes.

Joining the likes of The Canal and The Babadook as another slow-burn horror entry from 2014, Starry Eyes differentiates itself from the other two due to its more visceral and bloody payoff as it comes to an end. Where The Canal relied on the excruciating build-up of dread and The Babadook's reliance on everything from character building to its symbolism, Starry Eyes mixes the elements of both as it moves from act to act as the overall tone, feel and direction gets figuratively worse in the best possible way. The practical effects used in the final act are - simply put - an amazing welcome for a genre that has become more than comfortable with CGI. The retro poster, created in the vein of horror posters from the '70s, lives up to its implied stylistic approach, aesthetic and tone of Starry Eyes that both Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer capture amazingly with the help of a hypnotic, childlike score.