Eye for an Eye

Anna Reeves, a young woman from New York, loses her parents in a sudden car accident and is sent to live with her grandmother May in a small Florida town. May is visually impaired, having mysteriously lost her sight years earlier. Isolated and desperate for connection, Anna befriends two local teenagers, Shawn and Julie. She soon witnesses Shawn push a young skater named Connor off a bridge, fracturing his arms; paralyzed by social pressure, Anna says nothing and does not report the incident, though she quietly helps Connor afterward. Connor, guided by May's sister Patty, carves the names of his bullies into an old tree deep in the local woods—an act that invokes Mr. Sandman, a vengeful supernatural entity of local legend. The film's opening has already shown a prior victim: a cheerleader dreams of falling through a stage floor and wakes with bloody, empty eye sockets, establishing the curse's lethal pattern. Mr. Sandman was once a visually impaired boy named Vincent, who wore glass eyes. Childhood bullies lured him into the woods, stole his glass eyes, and used them as slingshot marbles; one struck his head with fatal force. Vincent's body decomposed into sand near the great tree, and his spirit now inhabits it, targeting those who harm the innocent through their dreams. Shawn, Julie, and Anna begin suffering horrific nightmares. Anna discovers the carved names on the tree and pieces together the curse. Shawn dismisses the supernatural threat; Mr. Sandman visits him in a dream, tears out his eyeballs, and Shawn dies slamming his head into a tree while fleeing in blind panic. Julie is attacked in her bathtub—Sandman tears out one of her eyes—and she drowns. Anna, now the last name on the tree, confronts May, who has her own dark connection to the curse: May attempts to gouge out Anna's eyes, believing doing so will restore her own lost sight. In a desperate struggle, Anna drives a pair of scissors into May's eye socket. May falls down the stairs and, before dying, stabs Patty; Patty also dies from her wounds. Anna realizes that the curse's logic—an eye for an eye—demands genuine repentance, not merely survival. She deliberately fractures her own arm to match the injury Connor suffered, offering her body as restitution for her complicity in his bullying. In a final dream sequence, Anna finds Vincent and hands him the glass eyes he lost in life, granting him peace. She awakens the next morning with her vision intact; her name has vanished from the tree, and the Sandman releases her from the curse.

Sources: Wikipedia, DMTalkies (ending explained article)