The Life Before Her Eyes

Uma Thurman delivers a mesmerizing performance in "The Life Before Her Eyes," a film that, once seen and fully digested, exerts the same haunting pull as the shattering events it chronicles.

Thurman plays a woman named Diana, who, as a high school student 15 years earlier, was involved in a Columbine-like massacre. Played as a teenager by Evan Rachel Wood, Diana was trapped in the bathroom with her best friend, Maureen (Eva Amurri), when the young gunman burst in and forced the girls to choose who would live and who would die.

Cutting between those desperate hours and the almost dreamily peaceful suburban life Diana is leading today, director Vadim Perelman ("House of Sand and Fog") ruminates with obsessive detail over the artifacts of her seemingly perfect life, as well as what may or may not be Diana's increasing disconnection with reality.

At times, his aesthetic preoccupations and fascination with Diana's grief border on the maudlin, but when "The Life Before Her Eyes" reaches its genuinely shocking conclusion, it's clear that every single choice was exquisitely justified. Indeed, viewers may feel sucker punched by what has become something of a cinematic gimmick, but let Thurman's subtle performance sink in and what could have been an empty exercise grows into an uncommonly astute artistic and moral statement.

-- Ann Hornaday (April 25, 2008)

Contains violent and disturbing scenes, profanity and brief drug use.