Where “Yellow Eyes” succeeds is in its tactile, grimy aesthetic. Korman shoots the house with a claustrophobic eye, favoring cramped hallways and pitch-black corners that feel genuinely oppressive. The titular yellow eyes - practical effects, thank goodness - are sparingly used, and when they do appear, they carry an uncanny weight that CG rarely achieves. The sound design is equally sharp, layering whispers and low-frequency hums beneath the dialogue to keep the viewer on edge.
But the script is the demon in the room. The first half drags, stuck in a loop of spooky ambiance without meaningful character development. Brad, played by a game but underused Kunicki, is mostly a prop for the possession; his demonic turn is more snarl than substance. The film’s middle act introduces William Derrick III as “The Doctor,” a performance that borders on self-parody, and Margo O’Donnell’s Lana (a medium, naturally) feels like she wandered in from a different, campier movie.
The dialogue oscillates between functional and stilted. There’s a moment where Julia, at her wit’s end, tells the priest, “You have to believe me - I saw it with my own eyes,” which lands with a thud because we’ve already seen it with ours. Korman trusts the audience too little, explaining lore through clunky exposition rather than letting the imagery speak. The exorcism sequence, when it finally arrives, is a cacophony of Latin-adjacent chanting (all rendered in English here, of course) and furniture tossing, but it lacks the visceral invention of better films in the subgenre.
The film’s brevity is both a blessing and a curse. At 86 minutes, it never overstays its welcome, but the brevity comes at the cost of a coherent mythology. The relic’s origin is sketched in a single line; the demon’s motivations are vague; and the final showdown resolves with a cheap irony that feels unearned. It’s a shame, because Martins is a revelation. She carries the emotional weight with raw, red-eyed realism, transforming Julia’s terror into something you can almost feel. Her chemistry with Rooney is the quiet engine that keeps the film from collapsing into parody.
