The Sensation of Sight

Like short stories, poems, and songs, films either "work" or they don't. By "work" I mean, the piece has coherence, proper pacing, narrative drive, artistic elan, sufficient seriousness, psychological and emotional depth, but also a certain clarity that can't be feigned. Sad to say, THE SENSATION OF SIGHT doesn't work, i.e., it doesn't engage, fascinate, or absorb the viewer into its world. To cite one feature among many, David Strathairn's character, Finn, is one of those inscrutably quirky characters often found in indies, i.e., a dispirited but otherwise sane and articulate high school English teacher who has taken to carting around a wagon full of Encyclopedia Britannicas that he tries to sell to local townsfolk--for reasons that remain murky. In a word, Finn is a droll walking-talking caricature, not a real person and therefore impossible to credit with a sense of reality. Ditto for most of the other denizens of this whimsical little world. Young writer-director Aaron J. Wiederspahn exhibits glimmers of film-making ability but SENSATION OF SIGHT is a film that tries too hard to be "profound" and merely ends up being tedious.