The Eyes of My Mother (2016)
Directed by Nicolas Pesce
A young, lonely woman is consumed by her deepest and darkest desires after tragedy strikes her quiet country life.
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29 films that influenced The Eyes of My Mother
What critics say influenced The Eyes of My Mother
In early scenes, meanwhile, as protagonist Francisca is introduced in the girlhood form of striking newcomer Olivia Bond, it’s not just the young actress’s dark, concentrated gaze that recalls Ana Torrent in “The Spirit of the Beehive”; both films probe children’s repulsed fascination with the monstrous, though “Eyes” literalizes the terror in the barn rather more emphatically than Victor Erice’s 1973 classic.
Writer/director Nicolas Pesce makes an accomplished transition from music videos with this darkly disturbing slice of American Gothic that wears its debts to Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) with quiet pride.
Horror stories find different ways to isolate the victims, by setting stories in desolate, out-of-the-way places (like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Psycho), or by putting characters in situations where other people won’t believe them, or just can’t help.
If Ingmar Bergman had helmed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , it might look something like this exquisite nightmare.
Shooting in ominous black and white (often from a high, airy remove), Pesce has made an exquisite creepshow that pays homage to the mightiest of fear films, Tobe Hooper’s silent-majority satire The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), while still having a coppery taste all its own.
Or maybe an even better comparison would be classic “wrong turn” horror films like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or “The People Under the Stairs,” where ordinary folks who make the mistake of knocking on the worst possible doors.
It’s comparable to the early section of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before Leatherface makes his presence fully known.
Presenting itself as something like an Ingmar Bergman-directed remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Eyes of My Mother has little use for plot, character or dialogue, instead relying on lighting, sound effects and the terrifying presence of its lead actress, Kika Magalhaes, to seduce and horrify its audience.
Magalhaes is breathtaking in her role, too, a haunting mix of doe-eyed innocence and danger that reminds me of a young Felissa Rose in Sleepaway Camp or even Jessica Harper from Suspiria .
Pesce’s heartland Gothic visuals — specifically the very inky expanses of Zach Kuperstein’s glorious widescreen lensing — conjure spooked memories of Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter.”
Not so innocent is the leering home invader (Will Brill) who, in one terrifyingly framed interior shot, seems designed to bring back memories of Robert Mitchum in Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955).
Shot, digitally, in beautifully composed black-and-white, this darkly comic feature about a young girl growing up in violent times is set on an isolated American farm that looks like it could be just down the road from where Charles Laughton’s classic and equally unclassifiable The Night of the Hunter was set.
The striking feature debut of music video director Nicolas Pesce is a poised and meticulously controlled slice of American gothic that blends together a slew of influences from Hitchcock to Haneke via David Lynch and The Night of the Hunter .
Writer/director Nicolas Pesce makes an accomplished transition from music videos with this darkly disturbing slice of American Gothic that wears its debts to Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) with quiet pride.
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Magalhaes is breathtaking in her role, too, a haunting mix of doe-eyed innocence and danger that reminds me of a young Felissa Rose in Sleepaway Camp or even Jessica Harper from Suspiria .
In fact, there's something about Francisca that's oddly reminiscent of Eihi Shiina's Asami from the 1999 Japanese horror movie Audition.
At the hands of a less inspired filmmaker, THE EYES OF MY MOTHER would have surely been reduced to yet another silly iteration of the Addams Family-meets-The Beverly Hillbillies fish-out-of-water trope.
Horror stories find different ways to isolate the victims, by setting stories in desolate, out-of-the-way places (like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Psycho), or by putting characters in situations where other people won’t believe them, or just can’t help.
Working with the cinematographer Zach Kuperstein, he has absorbed a crucial lesson from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” filming in lustrous black-and-white images in which shadows are as dark and inky as bloodstains.
If Psycho 's Norman Bates had a sister then she might be a lot like Francisca in The Eyes of My Mother .
Put aside the photography and Eyes is little more than the caboose on the torture-porn train, with Psycho-esque Freudian pretensions to boot.
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From “Martha Marcy May Marlene” to “Simon Killer” and this year’s “Christine,” these filmmakers have fixated on probing the subjective experiences of alienated characters.
Pesce is the latest talent to emerge from the New York-based Borderline Films stable, following Antonio Campos ( Afterschool ), Sean Durkin ( Martha Marcy May Marlene ), and Josh Mond ( James White ).
Pesce is a next-generation addition to the collective at Borderline Films, whose Sean Durkin, Antonio Campos, and Josh Mond are responsible for some of the most exciting American art films of the past decade — visionary hybrids of character sketch and genre exercise like “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” “Afterschool,” “Simon Killer,” and “James White.”
The debut film by writer/director Nicholas Pesce – and produced by Borderline Films, the collective behind Afterschool, James White and Martha Marcy May Marlene – The Eyes of My Mother is a film tailor-made for the sliver of overlap on the “Art House/Gore Hound” Venn diagram.
This film comes from Borderline Films, a production company that’s mastered the art of tortured souls in past Sundance fare like Martha Marcy May Marlene , Simon Killer and James White .
Which is how good horror should operate; given that the movie comes blessed by Borderline Films, an indie outfit responsible for films like Afterschool (2008) and Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), you might think that this skew towards the imprint's in-house nihilistic chic.
(Ommetaphobes should be warned, if the title doesn’t tip them off, that they’re in for one of the squirmiest sits in a movie theater since Bunuel’s “Un chien andalou.”)
Mama also tells her that cows’ eyes are very similar to those of humans: cut to a severed bovine head on the kitchen table, as Mother—with shades of Un Chien Andalou —demonstrates exactly what she means.
Seriously, The Eyes of My Mother feels like Un Chien Andalou viewed through the eyes of a sociopath.