Get ready to lose your mind on this new Netflix series. “Open Your Eyes” is the newest polish series starring the charming actress Maria Wawreniuk and directed by Anna Jadowska and Adrian Panek. It’s a dark, suspense thriller which will keep you on your toes throughout the series. While the world has previously fallen in love with it, let’s take a glance on the reasons we fell in love with the series.
The series starts with the protagonist in a Psych Facility called Second Chance. She wakes up, recalling nothing about her past life. Soon we find out the facility treats amnesic patients and helps them regain their memories back. What’s different about this facility is that people here are required to work on their given talents, and everyone is brilliant in something or the other. After living there for a few days, ‘Julie’ or that’s the name the protagonist remembers, notices strange signs. She questions the authority and gets on a quest to prove something is wrong with the ways here. Along with her new friend and her love interest, Adam, who is also a patient in the facility, Julie finds clues about her past life and ways to run free from Second Chance. Along with everything, she keeps seeing a girl with red hair and hears the same name repeatedly ‘Karolina’.
Soon Julie and Adam break free and go off to her burned down house to investigate. They find out her house was not at all burned down and that her real name is actually Karolina. They are both caught by the facility soon and bought back. Although they were brought back, Adam was weaker than before. Karolina tries her best to fight free and finally triumphs by jumping into a river after the voice she keeps listening. Soon we see her waking up in a hospital room, with her mother and her sister, who is the red-haired girl. We learn she had a car accident and was in a coma for days. Whatever she had seen all this while, was it a dream or the reality? We leave that for you to figure out.
The plot and the script writing take a solid 10/10. The show keeps constantly wrong-footing you, consistently makes you wanting more, to figure out what is going on. It’s not at all predictable. Many people criticized the story is slow paced, but we liked the way it went on. First two episodes start off quite discreet and relatively stable, but as we move on to the next episodes, the story slowly builds up a tension that triggers the watcher’s excitement. With this being said, the writers cleverly keep you glued to your screen until the series ends. Also, the plot twists the show offers are just beyond phenomenal! It left us bewildered and jaw-dropped several times.
The show reminds us of a lot of ‘Stranger Things’, ‘Behind her eyes’, and ‘Elite’. But this was so much better than the other teen shows we have from Hollywood. Not being able to trust what we are seeing, but still staying invested in a story, worked great for the show. The narrative was not so hard that we got lost to and forth between the present and past, but we found ourselves scratching our heads more than once.
The characters are all very well played. We felt a great balance between all of them and all had their own purpose in the show. Of course, there was a protagonist and an antagonist, but the way all the other characters helped the show progress was astounding. The character of Julia or Karolina was so well cast. She made us have empathy for her character, at the same time made us admire her for how strongly she responded and reverted to her present situation and made everything feel so authentic and dreamy at the same time.
Atmosphere in the series is very mystical, dream-like, and has a lot of story lines and visions but they all connect in the end, and none of them are just “for effect”, it all has a purpose. Overall, this series was very well done and is worthy of every second you invest watching it. For a story about amnesia patients, this show will always be remembered by the world, and we can’t wait for season 2 to come out. For more mystery thrillers, check out our “Fear Street” article and let us know what you thought about the series.
