Tell-Tale (Michael Cuesta, 2009)

A heart transplant patient begins to suffer flashbacks to the last moments of the organ's previous owner and is impelled to seek out the donor's killers and wreak vengeance. Thus the basic concept of the Pang brothers' 2002 horror hit The Eye, already premasticated for US consumption in 2008 and cannibalised freely by numerous other films, is wheeled out yet again and jump-started back to life, sputtering with confusion. The director may think he's pulled the wool over the retreading police's eyes by having the title allude to Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart, in which a murderer is driven to confess by a belief that the victim's heart beats on, a symbol of guilt, but the similarity ends there and fumbling attempts to say something about the ethics of euthanasia are quite scuppered by a salacious championing of vigilantism. A botched operation altogether.

4/10