White of the Eye


White of the Eye is a 1987 British thriller film directed by Donald Cammell and starring David Keith and Cathy Moriarty. It was adapted by Cammell and his wife China Kong from the 1983 novel Mrs. White, written by Margaret Tracy.

Plot

A series of murders of rich young women throughout the area of Globe, Arizona bear the distinctive signature of a serial killer. Clues lead Detective Charles Mendoza to visit Paul White, a sound expert installing hi-fi systems in wealthy people's homes. His special talent is to make a noise which echoes through the air cavities in his head and shows him where the sound of the speakers should come from and echo in the room. He is married to Joan, whom, ten years earlier, he had seduced away from Mike DeSantos, who was her then boyfriend. Joan and Paul have a daughter, Danielle, together.
Paul, installing equipment at Dr. Sutter's home, proximal to the most-recent murder, is approached by Detective Mendoza—they have a cordial conversation about sound equipment, but it turns abruptly, when Mendoza asks Paul if he still hunts. Mendoza questions Paul about whether he knew the victim, and then asks him about the tires on his van—a tread pattern that has been located at the scene of the murder.
Mendoza meets with his partner Phil at the police station, where Phil has gathered criminal record information on Paul—they speculate on what kind of person he might be based on that information. Mendoza, working from photos of the crime scene, begins to identify some aspects of the killer's M/O.
Paul visits Fred, proprietor of the local diner—Fred mentions that Ann Mason has been asking after Paul, ostensibly to work on her satellite system.
Various flashbacks show Joan's previous relationship to Mike, traveling across the country from New York in Mike's van, heading for Malibu. It later explains how it came to be that they parted ways. The couple met Paul, whom Mike befriended. At Mike's suggestion, he and Mike go on a deer hunting trip together. Paul shoots a deer and then brutally mutilates it, winding up with blood all over his face, revealing a disturbing, frightening, and incongruous aspect to his personality. Mike catches Joan and Paul having sex. Mike puts a gun to the back of Paul's head but relents and winds up firing the gun over Paul's head, and he leaves.
In the present-day, Joan, on her way to Stope's Creek, stops in a gas station asking for directions. She asks for a restroom, and as she's walking around the building, hears a voice singing a familiar song. It's Mike DeSantos, a decade older. They sit and catch up, with Mike eating from a jar of homemade peanut butter. Mike mentions that he's been in prison, and mentions that he received a serious head injury—and also that that head injury seems to have given him the ability to see the past and the future. He emphatically asks Joan to promise not to tell Paul that she has seen him.
Joan soon suspects that Paul is having an affair with local married socialite Ann Mason. She finds his truck behind her house. She stabs his tires flat, which winds up providing him with an alibi for the most-recent murder. He begs her forgiveness as the police turn their suspicions away from him. At home, Joan, distraught, runs to the bathroom to vomit and, somehow, notices something odd about the inlaid soap-dish on the raised bathtub. She pries the inlay loose and looks inside, and sees something strange: plastic bags with mysterious shapes inside—body parts? Joan confronts Paul, and Paul, casually, tries to explain his motivations for killing. He believes he has been "chosen" and is expressing the nothingness of the universe, whose heart is female and destructive like a black hole. He is putting women "out of their misery," but he loves Joan.
Joan's distrust of Paul over the next night and day agitates him into a fury. First, he locks her up in a portion of the attic, and then he wraps himself in a suicide vest of high-explosives and paints his face in a form reminiscent of both Kabuki and the blood pattern of diving headfirst into a deer carcass, as seen in the flashbacks to Paul and Mike's hunting trip. Increasingly unhinged, Paul chases his daughter up through the attic, and minutes after accusing Joan of thinking that he'd "hurt my own kid," attempts target practice of her fleeing form, missing Danielle, but killing their dog Shasta. Joan and the little girl escape in different directions and soon Joan has to elude Paul in the abandoned quarry. It turns out Mike has been staying there, armed with a machine gun, certain that he will meet Paul again. He rescues Joan and takes away Paul's gun, leading him to the edge of the quarry. Paul makes the sound he uses in the emptiness of living rooms and savors its echo from the quarry. While incessantly pontificating about his philosophies of life and death, Paul reveals a lighter with which he has lit the fuse of his explosive vest. Mike opens fire on him with a machine gun and Joan dives into the lake in the quarry. Paul and Mike both die instantly, in a hail of destruction. Joan is reunited later with her daughter. She talks with Detective Mendoza about what the ten years with Paul could have meant, whose destructive and nihilistic nature she never realized.

Cast

The soundtrack album for White of the Eye features 10cc's Rick Fenn and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason. This album was remastered and released digitally and as a part of CD/vinyl box set in August 2018.
  1. "Goldwaters"
  2. "Remember Mike"
  3. "Where Are You Joany?"
  4. "Dry Junk"
  5. "Present"
  6. "The Thrift Store"
  7. "Ritual"
  8. "Globe"
  9. "Discovery & Recoil"
  10. "Anne Mason"
  11. "Mendoza"
  12. "World of Appearances"
  13. "Sacrifice Dance"
  14. "White of the Eye"

    Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 33% based on, with a weighted average rating of 5.8/10.