When she was five years old, Naina Shah lost her parents and her eyesight in a car accident. Now, twenty years later, her grandmother brings her to a hospital for corneal transplant surgery. "I'm feeling very scared," Naina admits, but Grandma tells her that this surgery is a blessing. She'll see.

Naina sees, all right. Amidst all the new colors and faces and photographs, she notices strange shadows. They whisper to each other in hallways and when Naina tries to tell her psychiatrist/lover (Anuj Sawhney) about them, he tells her not to worry: hallucinating is perfectly normal at this stage. But is it normal to recognize an "hallucination" in a missing person poster? Or to know that your hospital roommate will die before she actually does?

Naina is a paint-by-numbers ghost story, and not just because it's an Indian remake of Hong Kong's The Eye. The film is a salad-bowl of (mostly Asian) influences: it's easy to see where The Sixth Sense ends and The Grudge begins. Even the ghost-girl from Dark Water makes an appearance, complete with raincoat, red bookbag, and the exact same watery death.

This movie takes a bunch of elements I've seen before--donor organs wreaking havoc, ghosts, difficulties adjusting to a sense you haven't had for most of your life--and puts them together in one film. Supernatural visions aren't the only horror here: for Naina, being sighted is terrifying in itself. She's bombarded by color and can't recognize things without touching them. But every time she closes her eyes or tries to feel her way somewhere, she gets yelled at. To her grandmother and psychiatrist, Naina's sight is a gift and she's being ungrateful by acting blind. But to Naina, vision is a curse, whether she sees ghosts or not.

In fact, Naina herself may be the best thing about this film. Actress Urmila Matondkar makes Naina both strong and vulnerable. She may be scared, but she faces that fear to do what she thinks is right: having risky surgery or trying to find out why she's having strange visions. Naina is imminently likable, and we care what happens to her. I liked Naina's grandma (Kamini Khanna), too. She may be a stereotype-- the fussy old lady who harasses her granddaughter's doctors one minute and tries to set them up with her the next--but she's fun, anyway.

Allumination's disc doesn't have much in the way of extras--just trailers for Naina and other Allumination releases. Sound, available in both Dolby Digital 5.1 and Stereo, is adequate. So is the image, for the most part. However, some scenes were a little too dark to see what was going on. And although the disc claims that the movie is presented in 1:33.1, it is in fact non-anamorphic 2.35:1

It's hard to know what to say about a film like Naina. All of its elements fit together well enough (except for the Dark Water girl, who is not so much homaged as plagiarized); still those elements all come from other, better films. It might be scarier for those who aren't burned out on the "creepy Asian ghost story" subgenre, but I've seen everything it has to offer. I liked that Naina tackled so many themes (love, the nature of disability and whether making a disabled person "normal" is a laudable goal) but it doesn't really add anything to them. Still, Naina the best "blind person who sees ghosts after eye surgery" movie I've seen in a long time. But being better than Possessed (review here) isn't much of a recommendation.