In Your Eyes (2014)

Zoe Kazan is hearing voices. Could it be love?

It’s pretty rare in a romantic comedy when the two lovebirds don’t actually meet face-to-face until the last scene, but that’s the payoff in “In Your Eyes,” an oddly original yet ultimately dull and unsatisfying film directed by Brin Hill from a script by Joss Whedon.

The two main characters aren’t even in the same time zone for long. The movie begins with a crash of drama, literally, when a young girl named Rebecca pilots her sled down a hill and straight into a tree. She survives. But meanwhile, somewhere else, a young boy named Dylan suffers similar injuries when he suddenly belly flops to the floor in front of befuddled classmates.

After a fast-forward, we catch up with Dylan (Michael Stahl-David), living in a dusty mobile home in the middle-of-nowhere desert of New Mexico. Thanks to bad choices and even worse friends, he’s currently on parole and working at a car wash, now a reformed safecracker, naïve and lonely. Conversely, Rebecca (Zoe Kazan) lives in snowy New Hampshire and is married to a successful but boring doctor. The couple seems happy, but things grow weird between them when she flops on the floor during a dinner party, the result of a punch Dylan takes from a thug back in the southwest.

Pretty soon, this unspoken interconnectedness between Dylan and Rebecca becomes spoken. After all, as long as they are living in each other’s heads, they might as well talk to one another. The conversations, of course, grow steadily from friendly chitchat to flirtatious innuendo and finally to serious romance.

All of this is occasionally amusing and flecked with moments of genuine warmth, but where the movie really goes wrong has to do with its visuals – or lack thereof. The crosscutting between Rebecca and Dylan is so woefully uninspired it might as well be two characters talking to each other on the phone. And when they are caught, it’s played for easy laughs or heavy-handed melodrama.

The film spoils a fresh concept by running through stop signs for creative modes of expression. For instance, secondary characters are assembled chiefly when the protagonist’s soliloquies look like schizophrenic ramblings, even though most of the audience will realize that, thanks to technologies like Bluetooth and smaller-than-ever cell phones, lots of people seem to be talking to themselves these days. Why can’t the supporting characters be more curious instead of reactionary? What if either Rebecca or Dylan met someone else with similar gifts? Why not use more voiceovers and let the camera linger awhile on one character to introduce visual patterns?

Ironic that a movie called “In Your Eyes” ultimately lacks vision. Whedon is the popular comic book writer behind successful television shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and recently penned and directed Marvel’s “The Avengers.” His work here is promising but Hill’s artless direction – except for some lovely shots of chilly New Hampshire – largely doesn’t meet the ambition of the script. The actors are similarly pigeonholed, especially Zoe Kazan, so good before in “The Exploding Girl” and “Ruby Sparks.”

It’s interesting to note that “In Your Eyes” premiered this year at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City and then began playing (for five bucks) online. It’s one of those movies that, thanks to the digital revolution, survived without a conventional theatrical exhibition and remains available to the masses. Pity it wasn’t better.