The Eyes is a South Korean psychological horror mystery directed by Yeom Ji-ho, and it is a Korean remake of the excellent 2010 Spanish horror thriller Juliaโs Eyes, where the basic story remains centred around a woman whose eyesight is gradually deteriorating while she investigates the mysterious death of her twin sister, but the Korean version relocates the story and gives it its own visual and tonal identity – and this is one of those remakes where I did like the original a lot, so I was immediately curious about what the Korean filmmakers would actually change rather than simply reproduce.
Losing Your Sight While Someone Is Watching You
Seo-jin is a photographer who is gradually losing her eyesight because of a genetic disease, and when her twin sister Seo-in, who lost her sight before her, has apparently died by suicide, Seo-jin immediately feels that something about the circumstances does not make sense.
Nobody else seems willing to believe her suspicions, leaving Seo-jin to investigate the death herself., the problem is that her vision is continuing to deteriorate while she gets closer to the truth, and the feeling that somebody is watching her becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.
The Korean film also changes the profession and circumstances around the sisters, with Seo-in becoming a successful ceramic artist, and the objects and artwork found in her studio becoming part of the mystery surrounding her death.
That is a nice detail because it gives the investigation something physical to work with rather than simply having Seo-jin follow a trail of increasingly convenient clues.
Shin Min-a Gets Very Different From Her Usual Roles
One of the biggest reasons this remake caught my attention is Shin Min-a, who plays Seo-jin and Seo-in, because she has spent a lot of her career in romantic dramas and warmer, more approachable roles, so seeing her carrying a much darker psychological thriller is a noticeable change – Yonhap specifically highlighted how she captures the differences between the twins while also conveying Seo-jin’s fear as her eyesight disappears.
There is also a genuinely interesting production fact here: Shin Min-a has talked about changing the positioning of her eyes to help distinguish the two sisters, which might sound like a tiny performance detail, but in a film where the same actress is playing identical twins, those small physical differences become important – Kim Nam-hee, known internationally for appearances including Sweet Home, co-stars as Do-hyeok, while Kim Young-ah also appears in the cast.
im Nam-hee, known internationally for appearances including Sweet Home, co-stars as Do-hyeok, while Kim Young-ah also appears in the cast.
The Film Plays With What You Can See
The best idea in The Eyes is obviously the deteriorating eyesight, because it gives the filmmakers a built-in way of controlling what both Seo-jin and the audience can actually see, and the film reportedly uses blurred imagery and changes in visual clarity to put viewers inside Seo-jin’s failing vision, which could be interesting, and that becomes especially useful in this type of film because the audience is effectively working with incomplete information alongside the protagonist – you are looking at the same spaces she is looking at, but you cannot necessarily trust what is visible.
Director Yeom Ji-ho also reportedly draws on classic suspense cinema, with Yonhap noting influences and homages to filmmakers including Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, so there is clearly an attempt here to make The Eyes feel like a classical psychological thriller rather than just another modern Korean crime movie.
From Spain to South Korea
The original Juliaโs Eyes was directed by Guillem Morales, written by Morales and Oriol Paulo, and produced by Guillermo del Toro, with Belรฉn Rueda playing the lead., and it became known for combining psychological thriller elements with horror, particularly through the relationship between blindness, paranoia and an unseen killer.
The Korean remake is not the first time the story has travelled internationally either – Juliaโs Eyes has already been remade in India, including the Hindi film Blurr, as well as versions in Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, so the South Korean version is therefore another example of the original premise being adapted to a completely different film culture.
That makes The Eyes worth looking at as a remake in its own right rather than simply treating it as a Korean copy of the Spanish movie – the Korean setting, performances and visual approach give it another interpretation of the same basic nightmare.
A Rural Setting Gives It a Different Mood
The film reportedly begins more like a contemporary crime thriller, with Seo-jin dealing with a stalker in Seoul, before moving into a rural setting where much of the mystery unfolds, and Yonhap described the countryside sections as having a much darker, almost old-fashioned atmosphere, helped by the quiet nights and the film’s deliberately muted visual style – Ilike that change in environment because Julia’s Eyes already had a strong sense of isolation, and moving the Korean version away from the city gives the filmmakers another way of making Seo-jin feel increasingly cut off from everyone around her.
The mobile phones and modern technology are still there, of course, but the countryside sections apparently lean much harder into classical suspense, so that contrast between modern Korea and an almost old-school gothic thriller atmosphere could end up being one of the more successful aspects of the remake.
Trailer
The Eyes was released in South Korea on 24 June 2026, with a runtime of approximately 105 minutes, and is rated 15 in South Korea.
For me, the interesting thing here is not simply that Korea has remade Julia’s Eyes – it is whether Yeom Ji-ho can take a very familiar story and make the visual experience of losing your sight feel genuinely uncomfortable again, and with Shin Min-a playing both sisters and the film deliberately leaning into Hitchcockian suspense and distorted vision, there is enough here to make this feel like more than a straight remake.
Check out some more South Korean horror movies.
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