Open Your Eyes

Alejandro Amenábar's Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos) opened in 1997 and won two Goya Awards including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. The film consolidated Amenábar, then twenty-five, as one of the most distinctive new Spanish directorial voices of his generation; he would go on to The Others (2001) and The Sea Inside (2004), the latter winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The 2001 American remake Vanilla Sky, with Tom Cruise and Penélope Cruz (the latter reprising her role from the original), was directed by Cameron Crowe.

César (Eduardo Noriega), a handsome and wealthy young Spaniard with a substantial inheritance from his late father's business, has his life shattered when a spurned lover named Nuria (Najwa Nimri) deliberately crashes her car with him in the passenger seat, leaving his face horribly disfigured. As he awaits the possibility of an experimental face-transplant surgery, he becomes increasingly preoccupied with Sofía (Penélope Cruz, in the supporting performance that launched her continuing international career), the friend of his ex-friend Pelayo (Fele Martínez) whom he had been pursuing on the night of the accident. Chete Lera plays the prison-psychiatrist Dr. Antonio Duvernois.

The film operates as Spanish-language psychological-thriller in a register that combines genre-thriller conventions with substantial science-fiction-philosophical undercurrent. Hans Zimmer-style scoring (Alejandro Amenábar himself composed the score, as he typically does) and the central Spanish-cinema acting performances anchor a film that has been continuously cited as foundational in subsequent Spanish-cinema and broader European-thriller cinema.