SXSW 2026 Review: Aussie Horror DEAD EYES Is A First Person Nightmare
A weekend couples’ excursion the Australian woods goes hellishly awry in director Richard E. Williams’s experimental POV horror, Dead Eyes, premiering this week at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
Sean (Rijen Laine) and his fiancée Grace (Ana Thu Nguyen) are meeting up with couple friends Eric (Charles Cottier) and Kate (Alea O’Shea) for a camping outing to kick back and have a bit of fun, sadly, the fun doesn’t last long when their true intentions – to search for Sean’s missing and estranged father – come to light. When childhood friends Sean and Charles begin to explore a remote shack they frequented in their youth, its current resident(s) turn their optimism into a nonstop, bloody nightmare, and no one is safe from the terror.
Shot entirely from Sean’s point-of-view (we never see anything more than his hand as it holds a flashlight, Dead Eyes is definitely hanging a lot of its success on whether this first-person hook actually lands. Thankfully, the camera serves as far more than a cheap trick to keep the audience engaged, which is very impressive as this could have worn thin very quickly.
The film opens with Sean coming back to consciousness after a fall in the woods, when his eyes open, we are presented with the world the audience will be living in for the next eighty-five minutes. Sean is a cautious man, guarded even, and it shows in the way Grace and Eric regard him. Grace is the social lubricant that allows him to operate fluidly with the outside world, while Eric is something of a loose cannon who presents a chaotic yang to Sean’s closed off yin.
As they get closer and closer to the truth about Sean’s father, all while dealing with the long simmering trauma associated with his younger sister’s tragic death in these very woods, it becomes clear that perhaps Sean’s father’s abandonment of the family years before was just the beginning of a hysterical slide into madness that has the potential to consume them all.
Whatever you think Dead Eyes is from the opening act, you could never be prepared for where it goes as Sean dives deeper into the mysteries that live in the woods. The camera’s fixed position and field of view directly in front of Sean means that we are trapped with him, so sounds, shadows, and flashes that he barely sees, we are also left to ask about. It’s a kind of paranoia that keeps us on both sides of the screen on the edge of our seat. When Eric suggests a “hero dose” of mushrooms to try and break Sean out of the PTSD cage in which he finds himself, we are dragged along for the very bad trip (thing Midsommar tea party), not only to the menacing woods around us, but also into a past that he’d been trying to reconcile for decades, and it’s an absolute horror show.
There are moments as the film wears on that shades of something like the Silent Hill video game come to mind, wandering through misty woods with nebulous malevolent beings just out of focus. However, while it immediately strikes as perhaps a bit derivative, through the third act the pace picks up so that we’re moving at such a clip through various Barker-esque hellscapes, that it is almost impossible to catch your breath. If you’ve ever wondered what the mysterious lost Event Horizon hell sequences look like, it’s probably something like this.
As a result of the mode of shooting, Sean is largely characterized through dialogue and physical affectations, which are a combination of Laine’s voice acting and the incredible work coordinated by cinematographer Julian Panetta. Much of the world around Sean is filled out by the performances of Nguyen, Cottier, and O’Shea and their reactions to him, which is a novel and effective way of getting us into the skin of the character we, as the audience, inhabit here.
Dead Eyes is one of the most uniquely crafted horrors of the last several years and it uses its POV gimmick to serve not only the plot, but also its thematic center in a way that perhaps wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. By trapping the viewer inside the perspective of a main character who is struggling with his own lingering trauma, we are forced into a position of empathy and recognition of the emotional toll it has taken on him. As numerous ghastly horrors compound around him, the viewer is not provided the usual respite of distance, we must experience it with him and try to fight our way through it. There is a world in which writer/director Williams presented the film in a more standard viewing experience, but it wouldn’t have the same effect, in this case an abundance of style and craft supports substance in a way that makes Dead Eyes truly terrifying.
