The Eavesdropper (2004)

**SPOILERS** Surviving a brutal mugging where her husband was killed and she left totally deaf from the gunfire Liza Raines', Lucy Jenner, life went into a downward spiral. It's when it was decided to experiment on Liza's deafness by implanting a number of revitalized cells into her inner ear that she miraculously regained her hearing. This soon became a curse more then a blessing for Liza.These secret ear experiments conducted by Doctors Kramer & Hsieh, John De Lancie & George Takei, did in fact improve or cure their patients loss of hearing but also drove them both insane and suicidal. In fact of the 15 persons who were treated by the two doctors 14 of them ended up dead within the first three weeks with only patient #14 Liza Raines being the only one who survived!Not only did Liza survive with her hearing and health in tact but was able to not only hear what people say but what they think as well! Something that the top Washington D.C CIA Administrator Aiden Porter, Costas Madylon, became very interested in and wanted to have Liza put under his control.As we soon see Porter wasn't at all interested in the national security of the United States but the personal security of his himself and his job. Porter wants Liza to read the minds of his superiors like Let. Gen Geroge Humes, Tucker Smallwood, and use what dirty secrets that they have to blackmail them. This leads in Porter's finding out through Liza the thoughts and actions, in him being a pedophile, of a newly nominated Supreme Court judge who was going to vote against funding his agency. This not only forced the judge to withdrawal his nomination for the the Supreme Court but to hang himself in his garage!It's later when Liza realizes what her boss Aiden Porter is up to in using her unique ability to farther his own power in government, to both blackmail and murder, that she started to use them against him. That's in exposing Porter's plans in him becoming the power behind the President and the Congress in running the country anonymously and without being challenged by the election process. But before Liza can do that she has to prevent Porter from murdering her, like he already did Doctors Kramer & Hsieh, in order to prevent Liza from bringing the truth out about him and his diabolical future plans to the public!

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.