Directed by Guillem Morales, who wrote the story with Oriol Paulo and produced by Guillermo Del Toro, Julia’s Eyes isn’t an Italian movie made in the 60s or 70s, yet it has the giallo in its heart.

This starts with a blind woman named Sara (Belén Rueda) being haunted by an unseen presence. She decides that she has to hang herself to escape her life, but changes her mind at the last minute. As she prepares to get down, someone kicks the chair out from under her. As this happens, her twin siser Julie (also Belén Rueda) senses her death.

Sara and Julia both have the same degenerative eye disease, as Julia is slowly losing her sight. She tells her unbelieving husband Isaac (Lluís Homar) that her sister, whose eye surgery didn’t save her vision, couldn’t have killed herself.

As a giallo heroine, Julia must investigate the case herself. She meets her sister’s neighbor Soledad (Julia Gutiérrez Caba), a blind woman who tells her that everyone will leave her, including her husband, as her son Angel (Pablo Derqui) did to her. She also tells her that her sister had a boyfriend, which leads her to a hotel where a janitor named Créspulo (Joan Dalmau) tells her that men in the shadows are watching her and are tired of being ignored.

Things get worse. Isaac disappears and Créspulo is killed. When the police take Julia, whose eyesight is nearly lost, home they discover Isaac has also hung himself, leaving behind a suicide note stating that he had been in an affair with Sara. As surgeons work to repair her eyesight, Julia now must move into her dead sister’s apartment and attempt to keep her eyes bandaged for two weeks, which is how long the donor eyes will take to adjust to her body. She will have an assistant, Ivan (Dani Codina) to take care of her and ensure that she doesn’t remove her bandages.

Days before she gets to see again, someone breaks in and drugs her. She barely fights him off and learns from a neighbor’s daughter that that man was Ivan. She also says that he was the one who ruined Sara’s operation, kidnapped Isaac and forced him to write the note before killing him and has an entire room filled with photos of Julia and her sister. She tears off the bandages to find that the room that she is in is definitely filled with those photos and the young girl is dead.

Obviously, spoiler warning from here on out.

Ivan is really Angel, who killed and replaced the assistant. He believes that only blind women can love him, as they depend on him for their care. Soledad appears and shows that she is not blind, so Angel goes all Lucio Fulci and attacks her eyes with a needle. The police arrive just in time for Julia to find him in the dark, at which point he slices his own throat.

Julia’s vision lasts just long enough to come to the morgue, where they have been keeping her husband’s body, and say goodbye. The eyes that were donated to her were his, and now as teh result of Angel, no longer work.

Remade in 2022 as the Hindi movie Blurr, Julia’s Eyes has enough of the past while looking — well, you know what I mean — bravely to the now and beyond. It’s a thrilling movie and one that I hope more people watch.

You can watch Julia’s Eyes on Tubi.