Ambitious First-Person Horror Gets Lost in the Woods [SXSW 2026 Review]

Dead Eyes, which premiered at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival, marks the feature debut of Australian filmmaker Richard E. Williams. It’s an ambitious project that strives for originality, experimenting with a first-person perspective while weaving in surreal imagery and psychological horror themes. That ambition is admirable. Unfortunately, the film ultimately struggles to translate those ideas into a cohesive or compelling experience.

The story follows Sean and his fiancée Grace, who venture into a remote wooded area searching for Sean’s missing father, Paul. Years earlier, Paul vanished after the death of his youngest daughter, Lily. When Sean returns to the place where Lily died, he’s forced to confront buried trauma and family turmoil. What begins as a tense search soon turns into something far stranger. Sean discovers that Lily may not be gone after all. Instead, the woods are populated by multiple versions of her, feral cannibalistic children who look identical to his deceased sister and who quickly turn violent.

All of this is framed through a first-person POV perspective, combined with a shrooms-initiated psychedelic nightmare structure that suggests Sean and company may be unreliable narrators. That kind of conceit isn’t especially new in horror, but it can be effective when executed properly. Here, however, the approach is confusing rather than immersive. It’s not clear how the POV device is meant to function within the story’s logic, and the film never really helps the audience understand why it’s in place or what it represents.

Still, Williams clearly aspires for depth and to say some existential beneath the surface of this monster-in-the-woods day trip. His story gestures toward themes of childhood trauma, fractured memory, mental illness, and the cyclical damage caused by abusive family dynamics. These are potentially rich ideas, but the story struggles to connect them into a coherent or entertaining narrative. Instead, the themes feel scattered, introduced but never fully developed.

Ironically, the film’s technical strengths sometimes work against it. Dead Eyes looks quite polished, and the cinematography is competent throughout. But the glossy, high-definition aesthetic seem misjudged with the first-person perspective the film relies on. A POV horror film set in the woods could benefit from a rougher, grittier visual style. It could hide the rough edges and help the audience invent some unseen, personal horrors that are out of range to craft with a budget of this level. The obvious reference here is The Blair Witch Project, a terrifying experience that shows you basically nothing. Dead Eyes inverts that success by ensuring every detail is clear as day. The slick presentation and sunlit frames make it all less forgiving.

The gore and creature elements are similarly uneven. There are flashes of genuinely interesting grotesque imagery, including disturbing science experiments involving a sack of human intestines discovered in the basement of an abandoned shed in the woods. Moments like this hint at the kind of cerebral horror seen in titles like Silent Hill or Jacob’s Ladder. Unfortunately, the execution is sub-standard. Much of the horror ends up feeling cheap or half-formed, more reminiscent of a mid-tier haunted house attraction than a fully realized horror film. The creature design, costuming, and scares often have the look and feel of what you might find in the Halloween seasonal section of a small town hardware store.

And while the performances here are serviceable, the script ultimately proves to be the film’s weakest element. Dialogue frequently leans on cliché, and some exchanges land as unintentionally silly. The writing struggles to support the film’s larger philosophical swings, which include doppelganger horror, bodily experimentation, and big existential ideas that never quite Frankenstein themselves together.

Still, it’s hard not to respect the spirit behind Dead Eyes. Williams is clearly trying to push beyond familiar horror formulas, and his film shows an eagerness to explore unusual imagery and ambitious themes. That creative impulse is worth acknowledging and could hint at more successful work down the line. At the same time, the film feels overextended, attempting to juggle more ideas than its story or writing can sustain.

Dead Eyes premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas on March 12, 2026

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