The Eyes of My Mother (2016)
"Loneliness can do strange things to the mind."
In the case of Francisca, the far-from-heroic protagonist of debuting writer-director-editor Nicolas Pesce's exquisitely crafted psychological slasher drama, The Eyes of My Mother, that would be the understatement of the century.
That keen observation is uttered by the titular (and unnamed) mother to her young daughter as she recounts the legend of St. Francis of Assisi, explaining that he spent many years living alone in the woods. One night, he saw an angel burning in the sky, and when he woke up, he had stigmata. He died of an eye condition that supposedly would've caused psychosis. Upon first glance, this bizarre and tragic anecdote sounds irrelevant, like a mother educating her child on a figure she finds fascinating. We know the ghost of St. Francis isn't going to manifest and serve as the antagonist of this movie, right? Then why open your story by having your character say this? In a short amount of time, it becomes painfully clear that the unbearable loneliness suffered by Francis, as well as the fate he would've suffered had his illness not taken him prematurely, will be visited upon young Francisca.
As aesthetically resplendent as it is narratively intimate, The Eyes of My Mother is a harrowing, chilling, and borderline surreal exploration of loneliness, isolation, and the ramifications of unprocessed childhood grief and trauma that announces Pesce as a boldly uncompromising voice in modern horror. The past decade has witnessed the emergence of an abundance of talented filmmakers making their mark with an original addition to the horror genre, and it's not difficult to understand why. They're relatively cheap to produce and don't require a massive budget or impossible-to-afford cast of A-list heavyweights. All that's necessary are a cast of talented actors, an imaginative script, a fresh concept (or approach to a familiar one, because let's face it, coming up with a completely original concept for a horror film is damn near impossible), and a director with the ability and determination to bring their vision to life, no matter how much money they have at their disposal. The filmmakers who come to mind that meet these requirements and then some are Robert Eggers, Mike Flanagan, Ari Aster, Jennifer Kent, David Robert Mitchell, Jordan Peele, and James Wan.
Wan is the most long-standing of the pantheon of modern horror giants, having cut his teeth in the art of horror with his 2004 torture porn groundbreaker, Saw, before transitioning to a more audience-friendly and character-driven direction with his 2013 supernatural haunted house chiller, The Conjuring. Both have transformed from one-installment hits to ongoing franchises, but Pesce outshines them all in his astonishingly modulated combination of cringe-inducing gore, artful restraint, and penetrating character-focused interiority. His empathy for his central character, who represents the ugliest and most macabre dimension of human nature, sets his feature debut apart from the horde while introducing one of the most multilayered, horrifying, and tragic female serial killers in the annals of horror history, brought to life by a magnificently layered starring performance from former dancer Kika Magalhaes.
Francisca (played as a child by Olivia Bond) is a little girl living on a rural farm with her parents. The time period is undisclosed, but judging by the small TV in the living room, the rotary phone, and old-fashioned, dirty-white refrigerator, it appears to be anywhere from the 1950s-70s. Her mother (Diana Agostini) is a former eye surgeon from Portugal who teaches Francisca how to dissect the eyes of cows, explaining that the construction of their eyes is nearly identical to those of humans, the only difference being that they're bigger. Her father works outside the home, and while the title of his job is never alluded to, he arrives home with a toolbox in hand. Pesce paints a remarkably taut introduction of Francisca and her family, succinctly establishing their dynamics through action rather than dialogue. Francisca clearly shares a close relationship with her mother, the two of them spending their days attached to the hip on the farm, picking flowers and feeding the cows. Her father (Paul Nazak), on the other hand, is portrayed as an extremely cold, reserved, nearly silent man who demonstrates no affection for either his wife or daughter, as evidenced when he arrives home from work and walks past them without uttering a word or distributing a single hug or kiss. It seems as though this strange family of three lives in their own private world, isolated from the rest of society.
That idyllic, tranquil existence is shattered to bloody pieces one day when a sadistic serial killer named Charlie (Will Brill), posing as a friendly salesman, pays the family a visit and asks to use the bathroom. Against her better judgment, Mom lets him in, insisting that her husband will be home "any second now." Apparently having heard that line before, Charlie draws a gun and orders Mom to show him the way to the bathroom while Franny sits silently on a kitchen chair. When Dad turns up, he finds his wife being beaten to death with the gun in the bathtub. Following a brief scuffle, Dad renders Charlie unconscious and chains him up in the barn, burying his wife in the woods. Seized with an impotent grief and anger, Dad withdraws into an empty shell of a man, sitting in front of the TV smoking and drinking. Fueled in part by her dad's dismissal of her, Francisca develops a toxic, twisted friendship with her mother's killer, visiting him regularly in the barn, feeding him rodents found on the land, and, to follow in her mother's footsteps, removing his eyes and vocal chords. When asked if she's going to kill him, she flatly replies, "Why would I kill you? You're my only friend." Through time, Francisca and her father grow closer, the latter sleeping beside her and partaking in a touching father-daughter dance to a Portuguese romantic ballad.
Years later, an adult Francisca (Kika Magalhaes) is devastated by the passing of her father, coming to the realization that she's now permanently alone, save the still-alive but blind and mute psychopath chained in the barn. As her isolation mounts and her thirst for human connection reaches a psychopathic crescendo, Francisca determines she can no longer bear to be alone and will take the utmost extreme measures to reclaim the sense of family robbed from her all those years ago.
In my previous review for M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, I delved into the central theme of the universal need for human connection and interaction. In that powerfully moving ghost story, the spine-tingling spectral haunts were subordinate to the shared longings between the quartet of protagonists. Each of them longed to communicate with the person closest to them. Malcolm wanted to let his wife know how much he loved her, despite the extensive time he had to devote to his work with troubled children; Anna grieved the death of her husband while fighting a muted attraction to a male coworker; Cole ached to let his mother in on his secret, but feared doing so would result in her looking at him like a freak as everyone else did; and Lynn found herself becoming frustrated with Cole for refusing to open up to her and trust her with the source of his pain. The distinction between Shyamalan's portrayal of this human necessity and Pesce's is as sharp as a shard of glass. Whereas the former's characters resolved their longings with prolonged, tearful embraces and soft-spoken, tender proclamations of undying love, the latter's protagonist achieves her catharsis through inhuman mutilations, sexually charged stabbings, and child abduction. The methods of exploration couldn't be more dissimilar, but the feelings of tragedy and heartbreak engendered by both filmmakers are undeniable.
A more apt comparison to The Eyes of My Mother would be Rose Glass' 2019 psychological thriller, Saint Maud. In addition to likewise being the feature debut of the filmmaker in question, that film similarly centered around a young female protagonist driven to insanity by the suffocating depths of her loneliness and isolation. While both Maud and Francisca are compelling, original, sympathetic, and unforgettable modern additions to the pantheon of female horror villains, Francisca is at once the more monstrous and heartbreaking of the two. We learn nothing of Maud's relationship to either of her parents, and though her desperation for companionship is excruciating and palpable in the bar scene, she essentially sabotages her relationship with her patient by trying to drive a wedge between her and her girlfriend. Francisca's mother is unfairly taken from her by a deranged madman all because the two of them were home at the time of his arrival, and despite her tone-deaf claim to a woman she picks up at a bar, it can be assumed she didn't ask to lose her father in his sleep. Maud makes a conscious choice to leave behind her former friends and trade a promiscuous life of partying for a religious one of devotion to God. She essentially chooses her isolation from society, while Francisca is left alone through external forces beyond her control. However, a common thread that links both women is trauma. Maud's decision to leave her former life behind and turn to God is fueled by her inability to save a patient under her care; Francisca's descent into madness and depravity by the vicious murder of her mother at the hands of a psychopath as a little girl. If neither unimaginable trauma had occurred, it can only be assumed Maud and Francisca would've gone on to lead much different lives. What makes Francisca's tragedy even more captivating is the way in which Pesce examines how one deranged serial killer can give birth to another.
Now that I think about it, most female antagonists in horror seem to be motivated primarily by a specific trauma. Apart from Maud's fatal workplace failure and Francisca's childhood loss, take a look at Pamela Voorhees from Friday the 13th. On the face of it, she's a delusional, irrational wackadoodle who stalks a bunch of innocent young camp counselors in the woods and picks them off one by one, even though not one of them has done a single thing to her. But think about her tragic backstory as a mother who lost her son at 11 years old, the only person in the entire world she loved, all because his negligent counselors were off (allegedly) having sex instead of watching their special-needs charge, and you can understand where her contempt for teen sexuality and mental separation from reality come from. Carrie White is even closer to the league of Maud and Francisca, a naive, isolated teenager abused by her fanatical mother at home and tortured day in, day out by her classmates. Until one night, she's asked to the prom by a kind soul, and wins prom queen, and for a brief moment gets to feel like a princess, like someone who matters, with hundreds of people clapping and cheering and smiling at her. And then came the bucket of pig blood, and all her years of pent-up fury exploded into a massacre of screams, blood, and fire. It wouldn't be a stretch to say Carrie is the most levelheaded and defendable of the group. Then there's Carol Ledoux from Roman Polanski's Repulsion, whose titular distaste of men and sexuality is implied to stem from sexual abuse in her childhood at the hands of her father. Very few female horror villains are the way they are by inclination, apart from Baby Firefly from Rob Zombie's House of 1,000 Corpses trilogy. What distinguishes Francisca, however, is not her body count or her upbringing, but rather the grotesquerie of her future adult actions, her utter lack of empathy for human suffering, the fact that her craving for blood is transferred into her by another maniac like a disease, spread from one victim to another.
Of course, Charlie can't be blamed entirely for Francisca's development into a baby-snatching murderess. Her father is the much quieter antagonist of The Eyes of My Mother, the instigator. He may not have caused the trauma that would forever change his daughter's life for the worse, but he certainly nurtured her malevolence. Instead of calling the police on Charlie after he killed his wife, he makes a choice to enslave him in his barn to enact a lifelong revenge, and worse, forces his daughter to participate. He instructs her to silence Charlie when he continuously calls her name, to help him bury her mother, and to clean her own mother's blood in the kitchen while he wallows in the grief on the sofa. This is an extremely selfish and irresponsible father. And to drive her into the arms of her mother's killer even further, he ignores Francisca when she attempts to bond with him or make him dinner. Nonethelss, Nazak allows, in private moments, such as when he's giving himself a bath or lying in bed beside Franny, unable to fall alseep, for us to see the broken, withdrawn, suffering man hidden within this macho, seemingly emotionless exterior. Francisca is not a monster by nature. She's a product of her older "role models": the professional precision and curiosity of her mother, the icy stoicism of her father, and the inhumane sadism of her one and only "friend."
Kika Magalhaes may not boast the name recognition of Sissy Spacek or Catherine Deneuve, and she doesn't seem to be breaking out into the leading star of Morfydd Clark, but mark my words: she is a star, and I couldn't imagine a more beautiful, more graceful, more nuanced actress taking on this behemoth of a character. As Francisca, Magalhaes is required to do a lot. Once her chapter of the movie (titled "Father") commences, and the role is passed from Olivia Bond, Magalhaes dominates the frame in nearly every remaining second, crafting a villain who is simultaneously lonely, delusional, soft-spoken, childlike, disconnected, and inexcusably reprehensible. Francisca is one of the most challenging roles any actor could be tasked with portraying, because her behavior is so abhorrent, and she displays such a vile lack of remorse or compassion, and yet there's an underlying heartbreak that's both understandable and relatable. As someone whose closest relationship has always been with their parents (and cat), I can empathize easily with Francisca's pain over losing both of hers. While I'd certainly like to think, when these awful days inevitably come, that I won't preserve my parents' corpses and lie with them on the couch and in bed as if they're still alive, I know for a fact I will be racked with grief, crying my eyes out, asking them why they're leaving me, begging them to come back.
She has an almost ethereal beauty, lithe figure, and uses her former career as a dancer to accentuate Francisca's spontaneity and sensuality. At one point, Francisca props her father's corpse on a chair and performs a dance in front of him, set to the same song they once danced to in her childhood. With one hand waving freely in the air and the other holding up her dress, Magalhaes dances with the utmost fluidity, a method of hiding behind the ugly reality of her situation. All throughout, she plays Francisca with an ice-cold detachment that illuminates her dissociation and unprocessed trauma. The most frightening detail of her phenomenal performance is the absentminded smile she wears to convey Francisca's inability to develop beyond the age when her trauma was inflicted. She essentially stopped maturing the moment Charlie killed her mother. A telling visual allusion to this information is made when Francisca is depicted lying in bed holding a doll. Magalhaes imbues her with a certain physical precision, even when she isn't performing "surgeries" on her victims. After she brings home a young woman named Kimiko (Clara Wong) from a bar, Francisca walks with disturbingly measured steps. After stabbing a mother named Lucy (Flora Diaz) before she can get to her infant son, Francisca moves toward the crying baby with her arms outstretched in a manner reminiscent of Sissy Spacek slowly walking out of her burning gymnasium. Francisca is socially awkward and laconic from years of living alone, so Magalhaes perceptively injects her with a robotic voice to highlight her unfamiliarity with human interaction. Listen to the offhanded manner in which she jokingly(?) tells Kimiko that she killed her father. The look of horror and disbelief on Wong's face is beyond evident to us normal folk, but Francisca fails to understand why she's so offended and desperate to leave. Once Kimiko stands up and expresses her desire to go home, Francisca panics and begs her to stay, offering to drive her home, running to grab her jacket. Kimiko begins backing away, gently insisting that she's just feeling a little tired, and Francisca, nearly in tears, follows her to the door and implores her not to go. The artistry in Magalhaes' performance lies in her ability to identify with and express Francisca's heartbreaking desire for companionship and refusal to spend another second alone.
In a lot of ways, Francisca, while technically (and thankfully) fictitious, feels inspired by two real-life serial killers: Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer. Like the former, she grew up with her parents in a farmhouse and shared a close bond with her mother. When Ed's mother, Augusta, died, that began his spiral into isolation and madness. Like Francisca, he murdered two people and carried out his crimes and lived a sheltered existence within the home in which he grew up. He was described by those who knew him as awkward and weird, two descriptions that fit Francisca to a T. She may even share deeper similarities with Dahmer, which may explain why she's one of my favorite modern horror creations: Dahmer is as chilling and tragic as real-world monsters come. Like Francisca, Jeff suffered an unusual, largely unhappy childhood with two troubled parents unable to raise their sons ideally. Throughout his killing spree, Jeff was living alone, either in his childhood home after his parents moved out following his high school graduation or an apartment in a mostly black neighborhood. He was also driven to commit murder by a suffocating sensation of loneliness. Every man he picked up at a bar, it was to escape from the isolation that was gradually consuming him. Kimiko's murder feels directly inspired by the murder of Steven Hicks, Dahmer's first victim. Like Hicks, Kimiko is Francisca's first taste of murder, literally and figuratively. Jeff picked Steven up on the road where he was hitchhiking to a concert; Francisca picks Kimiko up at a bar. Both killers brought their first victims to their house, where they spent some time socializing. And in both cases, it's only when the victims decided to leave that their killers snapped and forbade them in the most permanent way. Neither murder was premeditated. Rather, they were committed out of passion, out of the killers' inability to let that person leave them alone. Jeff and Francisca both dismembered their victims after they killed them, and while Jeff was confirmed to have graduated into cannibalism, Francisca is only implied (bagging organs in the fridge, drinking a wine-like beverage with her dinner). As original a killer as Francisca is in her own right, there's no way Pesce didn't pull inspiration from Dahmer while constructing her on the page. Two monsters made of flesh and bone, yet capable of inflicting the most inhuman monstrosities on others.
Olivia Bond paints a complementary portrait of Francisca as a little girl, establishing her dissociation and quiet eagerness for learning dissections with her mother. Her blank stare and soft, innocent, impassive voice pave the way for Magalhaes' subsequent performance once her work is complete, and the two turn out to be a solid match. It's very easy to imagine Bond growing into Magalhaes because they feel like the same one person.
As the man who makes Francisca into the soulless creature she grows into, the unfortunately named but effortlessly petrifying Will Brill delivers a blood-curdling performance comparable to Edwin Neal in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In his first appearance as Charlie the salesman, he steps into the frame with only his back facing us. From the front, we hear a breathy giggle. He's found his next targets. At first Brill presents Charlie as a friendly and inquisitive traveling salesman who just needs to use the bathroom, likely from spending so many hours going door to door. There's a slight undercurrent of suspicion in the way he asks Franny's mother if her husband is home, not to mention his admission that he isn't trying to sell anything. But for the most part he comes across as a nice, if slightly awkward, man. In the snap of a finger, in the most subtle movement forward, as he asks Agostini to "show [him] the way" to the bathroom, Brill sheds the oily salesman charisma in favor of a heart-stopping smile and intimidating vocal modulation that would make Jack Nicholson shrivel up in terror. Even once he's chained up and reduced to an ineffectual prisoner, Brill doesn't stop developing Charlie into a sadomasochistic monster who derives pleasure from both killing others and having pain inflicted on himself. When young Francisca peels pieces of dry bloody skin off his face, Brill is unable to restrain a laugh of pure, unforced pleasure. When asked why he kills people, his brutally forthright answer ("It feels amazing!") couldn't ring more true. This is a man who genuinely experiences pleasure from the pain and suffering he inflicts on others. He doesn't feel remorse, he won't lie about feeling remorse to save himself. He's 100% pure evil, driven by base instincts, and Brill makes Halloween candy out of his role. Imagine you're sitting alone one night on a swing at a playground, and some strange man emerges from the blackness to ask for a favor. That nightmarish chill that would run down your spine and freeze every muscle in your body, that's the effect of Brill's performance.
Of course, what's a terrifying villain performance without its accompanying reactive one? Sure, Brill manages to conjure an atmosphere of dread with only a single movement, creepy smile, and pitch-perfect line delivery, but it would likely fall a little flat, maybe even come across as campy, if it wasn't for Agostini's believably horrified facial expression. From the moment she meets Charlie, you can see the fear written all over her face, even as she struggles to project an appearance of politeness. Once he's inside her home, he asks if she's lived here a long time. "The bathroom is through the living room to the right," she replies, unsubtly evading his attempt at conversation. He gives thanks and proceeds in the direction, before turning back and asking another unsettling question. "Is your husband usually late. You said he'd be home any second." Again, she replies with the direction to the bathroom, her lips beginning to quiver and her eyes widening. As his tone becomes more demanding as he asks that she escort him, Mom finally asks him to leave, and it's then he pulls a gun on her. Her immediate instinct is to protect Franny, holding her behind her back and holding onto her hand as she's directed to a chair. In a short duration, Agostini presents a mother who's educated, protective, and warm, in stark contrast to her cold, uninvolved husband.
As stunning as the performances are across the board, an argument could be made the real star of The Eyes of My Mother is the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography by Zach Kuperstein. While I'm aware of the identical visual approach employed by Ana Lily Amirpour's 2014 Persian Western horror, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Eyes of My Mother is the first and only horror film I've seen in the 21st century shot in monochrome. And what a difference it makes. Not only does Pesce utilize the old-fashioned aesthetic as a counterpoint, juxtaposing the artistry of the colors and serenity of the setting with the grotesquerie of his protagonist's actions, but also to leave the time period of his story up for debate. Since black and white was employed mostly in the old days, that furthers the likeliness of his narrative transpiring in them as well. It also takes on a metaphorical significance for Francisca, visually exhibiting her lack of contact with and understanding of the world around her. The Eyes of My Mother just wouldn't have packed the same surreal punch if presented in color. The story and characters are entirely grounded in the real world, which makes the events all the more terrifying, but Pesce paints them in a surrealistic sheen, blending the beauty of an art film with the shocking carnage of a slasher. Every beautiful thing in life contains some form of ugliness when seen up close, Pesce seems to be saying.
The scenic beauty doesn't stop at black and white, mind you. Kuperstein captures and emphasizes the breathtaking majesty and limbo-like isolation of Francisca's environment, presenting it as her and her parents' own private world, removed from the rest of society. The expanse of the countryside and forest surrounding their home is vast and seemingly infinite. There are no other people, until Charlie makes his world-shattering appearance. The only known spot containing other members of the human race is a bar a few towns over. A good deal of the picturesque beauty is featured in the exterior and interior of the barn. On the inside, rays of sunshine shine through the slats of the doors, allowing the sporadic intrusion of bright white streaks to punctuate the dominating blackness. On the outside during nighttime shots, the barn light provides a beam of white light, contrasting the blackness of the night sky that surrounds it. After Francisca dismembers some corpses with an axe in the woods, Kuperstein gets a beautiful wide shot of the smoke billowing from the bonfire in which she tosses the limbs.
With Pesce's blessing, Kuperstein is permitted to let loose with a variety of innovative camera angles. He uses overhead shots to put the viewer in a godlike position of omniscience from the very first scene, combined with Pesce's fondness for capturing this twisted world from behind windows. As a trucker drives down a lonely street, our perspective is that of a passenger sitting in the backseat, staring out through the windshield as a small female figure materializes in the middle of the street. The trucker honks his horn, and the woman collapses. Stopping the truck, the driver rushes outside and observes the troubled woman, looking down at her as we look down at the both of them from the sky. When Francisca feeds a captive Charlie rodents in her barn, we stare down at them from the ceiling, witnessing two deranged individuals bonding with each other in their own deranged way. One night, Francisca sleeps outside in the woods, and in the morning, Kuperstein executes a low-angle shot staring up at the canopy, interrupting the sadness and savagery with the natural scenic beauty of the forest. In that same scene, after Fran wakes up, we're treated to an extreme wide shot of the trees standing before the deserted road, and Kuperstein holds on this shot more than long enough for us to soak in its austere yet dreamlike grandeur.
When Charlie attempts to escape in the middle of the night, blindfolded, malnourished, and feeble, Kuperstein places the camera behind a window and silently observes him stumbling across the land, looking over his shoulder, taking an almost perverse joy in the futility of his effort. Without any accompanying music, Francisca calmly walks toward him wielding a kitchen knife, confident that she has all the time in the world because he isn't going anywhere. When she exits the barn in the daytime, her abducted son, Antonio (Joey Curtis-Green), watches her curiously from behind that same window. The camera is placed in the same spot when she nervously enters the barn after discovering the door has been opened.
The Eyes of My Mother runs only 77 minutes, but a considerable degree of patience and commitment is required from the viewer because Pesce directs almost every scene in long, static takes, allowing his story to progress at a contemplative, slow pace, all the better to immerse his audience in the fractured frame of mind of Francisca. One night, she sits motionlessly in her car looking down, undecided about what she wants to do. "Do I start the engine or walk back inside?" Then she turns on the engine, but continues to sit for a little longer, contemplating. Pesce wants to ensure that we are privy to his character's every thought process. Longing for the touch of someone to sleep with, Francisca releases Charlie from the barn and brings him into her room to have sex with him. Her loneliness is so crippling, and her perspective on love and friendship so distorted, that she sacrifices her virginity to the man who murdered her mother and ruined her life. In a hip level shot, Brill sits upright on the edge of the bed, blindfolded, while Magalhaes stands still in front of him. Slowly she removes her bra and underwear, and because of the position from which she's filmed, none of her privates are graphically displayed for cheap titillation. She rests her hands on his shoulders, and Pesce cuts to a postcoital shot of her sleeping alone, once again, in bed, feeling, with her eyes closed, for his flesh. Later, she sits on the edge of her bed, staring at Antonio as he sleeps, saying that everything she does is for "you." Whether she's referring to Antonio or her mother is left unstated. She turns to look at herself in the mirror, as if confronting the ugliness in her character for the first time. "Who am I?" "What am I doing?" Pesce is never in a rush to the next gruesome image or shocking act of violence. He trusts in his leading lady's ability to command the frame even when nothing in particular is happening around her. Just sitting in her company is unsettling and absorbing on its own.
Pesce embraces the slasher nature of his screenplay, but his depiction of violence is artfully restrained. This is no conventional psycho-in-the-woods splatter fest masked behind a pretty aesthetic. The Eyes of My Mother earns its dual descriptor as both a slasher and art film, what with a pace as deliberate as its monster's movements, its painstaking exploration of a character's psychological journey through trauma, and its lack of onscreen penetrations. Take Charlie's death scene. We watch from behind the aforementioned window as Francisca approaches Charlie outside. Once she catches up to him, Pesce cuts a close-up of Francisca stabbing Charlie repeatedly in the back, but we never see the blade penetrating his flesh. Instead, Magalhaes thrusts her arm in an in-and-out motion, while the weapon remains out of the frame, and accompanying each thrust are a series of flawlessly timed thumps, almost like a knife being plunged into a thick slab of meat. The stabbing quickly takes on a psychosexual subtext, with the knife substituting for a penis. With her free hand, she holds Charlie close to her, kissing him on his shoulder once he takes his final breath, "climaxing" in her mind. "You were right," she confesses. "It feels amazing." This scene alone has to be one of the most insanely fucked up moments I've ever seen in horror. A delirious, deliciously bonkers blend of overdue comeuppance and sexual release. Francisca is torn between loathing the man who took away her mom and transforming him into the submissive lover she doesn't have the tools to find in the normal world. When she kills him, it's more out of resentment for him trying to abandon her like everyone else. In an earlier scene, where Fran claims her first victim, Kimiko, for the same reason, Kimiko backs away toward the front door, insisting she's become tired and wants to go home. Fran pleads with her to stay, and rather than showing the inevitable, Pesce smash cuts to the aftermath of Fran scrubbing blood off the floor and placing internal organs, covered in plastic wrap, in the fridge.
Don't let the restraint fool you, though. The Eyes of My Mother may sport the style to attract the arthouse crowd, but it features more than enough cringe-inducing imagery to sate the appetites of gorehounds. Some of us more strong-stomached enthusiasts who consider ourselves desensitized to slasher movie violence may even have a difficult time sitting through some of the more visceral sequences here. And that's because Pesce generates sympathy for his characters, so the gore carries actual weight. It's never "fun" or "exhilarating" escapist entertainment like, say, the Friday the 13th movies. Some have described the original Texas Chainsaw as feeling like a snuff film, something we shouldn't be seeing; I'd say this movie elicits an analogous reaction. Pesce assaults our eyes early on with a close-up of a cow's eye being sliced into methodically with a scalpel. Consider that an appetizer. Charlie and Lucy get their eyes and vocal chords removed, and while Pesce spares us an up-close look at the procedure itself, he holds nothing back in terms of the aftermath. The makeup work is magnificently macabre, each actor sporting two swollen, bloody eye sockets and a slit across their throat. To convey the passage of time, Charlie's lips become chapped, with patches of dried blood forming around his face.
The majority of The Eyes of My Mother plays out in silence, with the only diegetic sound in many scenes being a gust of wind or the soothing chirps of crickets. Composer Ariel Loh reserves his somber, hypnotic electronic score for some of the more provocative set pieces, such as when Francisca releases Charlie from the barn for the first time since his captivity. In the final scene, following Francisca's breakdown over her mother's skeleton, as she's walking back to her house in a soulful daze, Pesce accentuates her feelings of loss and confusion with the hauntingly beautiful musical introduction of The Acid's "Tumbling Lights." It's by far the most memorable piece of music in the movie. As for diegetic music, Pesce employs two ballads: a Southern one that plays on the radio in the truck in the opening scene, which instantly evokes the backwoods vibe of Texas Chainsaw; and a Portuguese one that Francisca and her father dance to in quite possibly the film's sole, touching oasis of serenity.
Pesce utilizes Foley sound effects to disquieting effect. When Francisca feeds Charlie the innards of rodents while he's chained in the barn, Pesce amplifies his obnoxious slurps to convey the extent of his hunger, as well as his pig-like snorts to emphasize his degrading status as a prisoner, his reduction to nothing more than a pathetic, dependent, powerless animal. It's a more than well-deserved fate for the man who set this entire tragic plot into motion. As for Lucy, she becomes the most sympathetic character next to Francisca, probably even more so. After Francisca performs her surgery on her, giving her the same treatment as she gave Charlie as a child, she sits Lucy up, and realizing that she can't see, Lucy begins to hyperventilate, and Pesce ensures that we hear, and therefore feel, every drop of her unimaginable anxiety. The most harrowing and nightmarish aspect of her ordeal is when she makes an attempt to scream, and it comes out in a hoarse, muffled whisper. When she pulls on her chains, they make a clang. As Charlie executes his escape from the property, and Fran is out of the frame, we hear in the background the sound of a drawer opening and the scrape of a knife as it's removed, aurally indicating what's about to take place.
Circling back to Lucy, it should be noted that, with only a single scene in which she has access to her voice, Flora Diaz gives a powerful performance as the most tragic victim. She picks Francisca up off the street and drives her back to her house out of the kindness of her heart. When Francisca asks to hold her son, Lucy politely insists they need to get going, but Fran preys on her kindness and trusting nature. Lucy relents, trusting that this young woman just wants to hold Antonio for a minute and won't do anything malicious. In a worst-nightmare scenario, Fran dashes out of the car with Antonio, fully confident that Lucy will obey her maternal instinct to chase after them rather than drive somewhere to call the police. Lucy runs inside Fran's home and follows the cries of Antonio upstairs into a bedroom, where he's lying in bed. Before she can take him, Francisca sneaks up behind her and stabs her in the back. In a film loaded with gut-wrenching images, the winner might be of Lucy crawling toward her son with a knife protruding from her back as Francisca calmly cradles Antonio in bed. Once she's reduced to a prisoner in the barn, Lucy vacillates between despair and strength. At times, she curls up into a ball and rocks helplessly back and forth. At others, she summons the strength to try to break herself out, even breaking her fingernails on a plank of wood. Without her vision or voice, Diaz doesn't just play Lucy as a mere victim. You can feel her refusal to give up hope of achieving freedom, and you root for her every step of the way. Her physical commitment to the role is unquestionable, as she's often required to crawl carefully or walk with a hunch. When her freedom finally arrives, with the help of her own son, Lucy further demonstrates how years of captivity have not dulled her intelligence. With chains still wrapped around her ankles, Lucy slowly drags herself across a street. Upon hearing the sound of a truck approaching from behind, Lucy turns around and remains rooted. Once the driver honks his horn, she smartly drops to the ground and curls up. Despite the indignities inflicted upon her, Lucy is certainly written and performed with dignity and grit.
There are some plot holes, but they're of the variety that you only think about after the screen cuts to black, not before. For instance, Francisca is never shown outside her home, save the one night she takes a drive to Donna's Bar. Therefore, she's never shown to have a job. While I grasp the point behind that, to imply that her childhood home is her entire world, it somewhat undermines the reality of the world Pesce has so lovingly crafted. If Francisca doesn't have a job, how does she afford to live in this house after both her parents are gone? How does she afford the clothes she wears? Does she drive out to town and steal from stores? How does she eat? By robbing grocery stores? Or is all the food she eats coming from the insides of her parents and two victims? No way would they be enough to sustain her throughout the years. When she was a little girl, did she go to school, or was she homeschooled by her mom, whose only real skill seemed to be ophthalmology? And when Antonio enters the picture, that muddies things further. How does she afford to nurture him? Surely she must be feeding him real food. And how is she obtaining his clothes? Then there's the matter of police interference. Until the final scene, how is it possible Francisca has gotten away, undetected, with everything for this long? After her mom was killed, no one came looking for her? Friends, family? After Fran abducted Lucy and Antonio, no police ever once thought to drive out to her property and question her? Apart from her parents, does Francisca have no other family, no relatives who would check in on her? It's almost as if the characters we see in this movie are literally the only people on the entire planet. What about when Kimiko goes missing? None of the other bar patrons saw her leave with Francisca? Is there no police investigation for anyone until Lucy is found?
Real world logic gaps aside, The Eyes of My Mother is a remarkable blend of psychological character drama and visceral, no-holds-barred slasher horror. It definitely won't cater to all tastes, and that's primarily because it doesn't have any qualms about offending your moral sensibilities. For a filmmaking debut, Nicolas Pesce has surpassed every other member of his community with a thoughtful exploration of loneliness and the damaging effect it can have on the human mind. Supported by a mesmerizingly introspective breakout performance from Kika Magalhaes and the dreamlike, luxurious vintage cinematography by Zach Kuperstein, Pesce has crafted an intimate character study that draws inspiration from real-life serial killers and evokes other female-focused horror films while telling a thrillingly original story with a thrillingly original lead character. As played by Magalhaes, Francisca is beautiful, graceful, relatable, and abhorrent. The most three-dimensional horror villainess of recent times. The Eyes of My Mother conjures a tangible atmosphere of nightmarish horror, and features imagery so vile and upsetting you may not ever be able to scrub them from your memory, but they're contrasted against a glorious aesthetic and imbued with a grounded solemnity not typically encountered in your average frivolous teen slasher. The Eyes of My Mother is a beautifully shot, thoughtfully paced, viscerally horrifying descent into the pitch-black bowels of human nature that establishes Nicolas Pesce as one of the most idiosyncratic filmmakers working in the horror genre today.
8.6/10
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