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Fashion photographer Dunaway's high fashion layouts bear a striking resemblance to the crime scenes left by a serial killer. Detective Tommy Lee Jones is assigned to the case to protect Dunaway from the killer and to figure out how she could know about the crime scenes. Her knowledge, unconsious at first, begins to manifest itself as psychic visions which eventually reveal the killer. Yada yada ya...

One can see John Carpenter hopped up on Italian giallo movies as he wrote the screenplay for this slick psychic thriller. In its plot particulars, Eyes of Laura Mars strongly resembles Argento's Deep Red, with its psychic visions and elaborate death scenes. If only Director Irvin Kershner had the style and cruelty of Dario Argento. The film goes to great pains to demonstrate the similarities between the crime scenes and the fashion layouts, but these are static. The film doesn't demonstrate any cinematic style to go along with its obsessive fashion sense. In fact, the movie leers at the fashion layouts and death scenes like they are pornography and the cinematic style prefigures the empty music video style of the next decade. All of the characters have the depth of fashion models on the slick pages of Vogue. This fascination with haute couture, especially in the grisly/kinky murder layouts, is distancing to the audience. The film is a cold fish: clinically sadistic and emotionally and viscerally uninvolving. Only Tommy Lee Jones seems to be immune to all of this. Even early in his career, his craggy face keeps him from being fetishized by the movie and his prickly screen persona transforms him into the only character in the film who isn't a figure to be placed into a design layout. Interestingly enough, his character turns out to be the killer. Is this a statement about the fashion industry? I wonder....