‘Open Your Eyes’ Plays Daring Games With Reality

“Open Your Eyes” can be heard two ways, as a physical command or a metaphysical warning to be aware, to pay attention to what’s happening around you. When the characters in this nervy and unnerving psychological thriller don’t do both, they end up in serious trouble.

A major hit in its native Spain, “Open Your Eyes” is part of a current spate of films, including “The Matrix” and David Cronenberg’s forthcoming “eXistenZ,” that deal with the always provocative notion of how we tell appearance from reality, madness from sanity, the physical world from a dream.

Although it eventually involves loopy science-fiction elements, “Open Your Eyes,” co-written (with Mateo Gil) by director Alejandro Amenabar, has sensibly chosen to focus on its realistic elements. What results is a complex, disturbing, occasionally terrifying story that wreaks determined havoc with our own fragile sense of what’s real and what is not. From its opening scene, when protagonist Cesar (Eduardo Noriega) has an experience that turns into a dream without our knowing it, “Open Your Eyes” is a puzzle picture, a tricky artistic head trip that is always daring us to figure out exactly what is going on at any given moment. All we often know for sure is that what we’re watching is both disorienting and disquieting, a feeling that’s intensified by music co-written by Amenabar and Mariano Marin.

Cesar is young, extremely handsome and very rich. When we initially meet him, he’s a spoiled urban playboy, teased by lonely best friend Pelayo (Fele Martinez) about never sleeping with the same woman twice.

At his 25th birthday party, however, Cesar meets the stunning Sofia (Penelope Cruz, the best thing in Stephen Frears’ “The Hi-Lo Country”) and thinks he might be falling in love. Never the most considerate of men, Cesar isn’t concerned that Sofia came as Pelayo’s date or that her presence infuriates Nuria (Najwa Nimri), a previous conquest who is partial to intense jealousy.

As this story begins to play out, however, the first of the movie’s several other layers reveals itself. Meeting Sofia is not happening now but in the past; in fact, that encounter is being related to a concerned psychiatrist named Antonio (Chete Lera) who’s visiting Cesar in prison, where he’s accused of committing a murder he doesn’t remember. Even more confusing, Cesar is wearing a mask that completely covers his face and that he adamantly refuses to remove.

It turns out that at some point Cesar did have an accident, which he survived--but at the price of a face distorted to look like a modern-day Quasimodo. That experience made Cesar extremely bitter, and his mood isn’t helped by the difficulties this causes with Sofia, who is not particularly interested in a beauty and the beast relationship.

That much is fairly clear, but everything that comes after--as Cesar and the psychiatrist sort through the detritus of his confused mind and try to pin down reality--is anything but. Did Cesar and Sofia get back together? Was Cesar’s face repairable after all? Why is he wearing a mask? What is the meaning of the cryonics infomercials Cesar can’t quite remember? Who was murdered and why? All you can say for sure is that nothing is what it seems.

While it’s inevitable that the ending of “Open Your Eyes” would be a letdown after this kind of driving, insistent buildup, it’s by no means unacceptable, and the film as a whole was good enough to interest Tom Cruise’s production company, which has purchased the remake rights.

Adept at creating unease, director Amenabar, whose first film, “Tesis,” won seven Goya awards (the Spanish Oscar), has put together a metaphysical thriller that recalls the French classics “Diabolique” and “Yeux Sans Visage.” For full appreciation, you have to take the advice one character gives another: “Don’t think about it,” he says, “or you’ll go crazy.”

* MPAA rating: R, for some strong sexuality, language and some violence. Times guidelines: some intimate sexual scenes.

‘Open Your Eyes’

Eduardo Noriega: Cesar

Penelope Cruz: Sofia

Chete Lera: Antonio

Najwa Nimri: Nuria

Gerard Barray: Serge Duvernois

Released by Artisan Entertainment. Director Alejandro Amenabar. Producer Jose Luis Cuerda. Executive producers Fernando Bovaira, Jose Luis Cuerda. Screenplay Alejandro Amenabar, Mateo Gil. Cinematographer Hans Burmann. Editor Maria Elena S. de Rozas. Costumes Cocha Solerea. Music Alejandro Amenabar, Mariano Marin. Art director Wolfgang Burmann. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.