In 'All Eyes On You', writer-director Ted Clarke crafts a psychological thriller that thrives on unease rather than spectacle. What begins as a familiar tale of a couple fleeing city chaos for countryside calm quickly mutates into something more sinister, thanks to a script that is as lean as it is layered.
The dialogue between Adam (played by Callum Parker) and Claire (played by Laura Nock) is deceptively ordinary at first, capturing the rhythms of a couple trying to rebuild their lives together. Yet Clarke’s script is riddled with fractures: hesitations, half-truths, and accusations that foreshadow the paranoia to come. This measured approach means the tension doesn’t rely on jump scares or contrived twists, but on the erosion of trust, both between partners and with the world around them.
What’s most effective is Clarke’s control of ambiguity. Each interaction with the neighburs teeters between benign and menacing, leaving the audience to wonder whether Adam and Claire are genuinely in danger or unravelling under their own fears. The script’s refusal to resolve that ambiguity too quickly keeps the audience complicit in the couple’s paranoia, sharing in their dread, questioning their perceptions, and ultimately doubting our own.
Thomas Pearce’s haunting score bolsters the film, Ollie Killip’s atmospheric cinematography, and a cast that seamlessly blends screen and stage experience. But it’s Clarke’s script that provides the scaffolding for these elements to shine. It is a story carefully engineered to test not just the characters’ trust in each other, but the audience’s trust in what they see and hear.
For a student production, 'All Eyes On You' achieves an impressive balance of precision and restraint. It is a film about surveillance and suspicion, but at its core, it’s about relationships, about what happens when the foundation of trust begins to crack. Clarke’s script makes sure that long after the credits roll, the unsettling question remains: when everyone’s watching, who can you really believe?
Written by Vlad A.G