The Eavesdropper (2004)

Good movie but grossly overrated

Expected more

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

How movies become keepers in my collection is they come back on me for days or weeks after I first see them. They haunt me, in other words, until I purchase a copy. Well, it took seeing Patient 14 a second time on TV to get that kind of grip. First time through I was hooked on the babe, of course, but I missed one of the main points, that noise can drive people crazy if they don't pay attention and tune out the noxious. So here's a movie about how we deal with incoming audio information, good & bad, and there's a lot of bad out there even without super hearing. When the bad guy gets a dose of his own medicine and falls down in agony over what he's hearing, it reminds me of modern day, digitally mixed audio commercials designed to carve searing paths of selective and permanent memory through our brains.

The secretary Liza Raines (Lucy Jenner) becomes deaf after a shooting in a robbery, is evicted and later she is found by the social assistant Grant Kane (John J. York) living in her car. Grant brings Liza to a Transition Shelter to be rehabilitated, and she accepts to be submitted to an experimental treatment never tested in humans in the Center for Hearing Research. The leader of the research Dr. Gene Kramer (John de Lancie) is pressed by the CIA agent Aiden Porter (Costas Mandylor) that is funding his experiment to test his vaccine of restoration of cells in fifteen patients, and he advises that the rats subjected to the experiment became psychotic. The patients also become psychotic and suicidal, with the exception of Liza, the patient 14. She achieves the ability of hearing frequencies emitted by the brain and read minds as a side effect. Porter recruits Liza to work in CIA disclosing the innermost thoughts of the suspects, but later Liza finds his real hidden intentions."The Eavesdropper" is a reasonable movie with an original story that has a great beginning and becomes too much complicated in the end with the betrayals and conspiracies. I thought this movie was a pilot of a show because of the open end. The unknown Lucy Jenner has a great performance, but her character deserved to be better developed in the beginning, showing her past life to the viewers. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): "Paciente 14" ("Patient 14")

Contrary to the previous reviewer, it is precisely the fact that you have to constantly hear multiple streams of thought of a few people at the same time, and decide what is "noise" and what is "important" what made this movie most interesting and enjoyable for me.It is a psychological experience that is exactly the opposite of what you normally do all day long... paying attention to the one stimulus that you already know is important in the given situation while what is not important automagically gets filtered out by your senses.For a layperson (regarding the complex machinery of your senses) this movie gives you a "hands on" way of appreciating the valuable work your senses do for you all the time, filtering out irrelevant information for you. Even if you are acquainted with the science behind the senses, this movie shows you how you probably would go insane if this filtering were not part of our makeup.

Although it was slow at times it shed light of a TV series idea in the commentary on the DVD. There have been other series that was about a real person or a real thing, so a focus on the character so a focus of day to day life could work. I have come upon movies that have a potential TV series idea and now if they would stop calling this just a TV movie they have something worth it. I like a movie about a real possibility and this is it, watch it if you like science fiction or science fact. I know this is science fact some say no but a series like this could beat other shows so I hope this is going somewhere. Another thing my medical problems with my brain (epilepsy) years ago could have given me a better life if only something like this had happened to me.One thing that many people say that several minds being listened to at once would be hard. In a crowd of people and all are talking and you want to hear one you focus on that voice. It's the same with the mind voice. I have talked to several of my doctors and they have commented that it is a real possibility.