The Eyes of My Mother (2016) Review!!!

Synopsis – A young, lonely woman is consumed by her deepest and darkest desires after tragedy strikes her quiet country life.

My Take – There are two types of horror films, one there is horror and then there is HORROR! While films like Poltergeist, The Exorcist or more recent ones like The Conjuring successfully provide thrills, chills and jump- scares that make for an exciting film-going experience, there are some films which don’t give any thought to the general entertainment factors in order to provide a firsthand experience into painting one of the most unsettling portraits of a person’s psyche. Looking in this film, one will come across the thought that how some film makers can make dozens of films throughout their career, garnering experience the entire time, and never make a film half as good, and then someone comes along on their very first attempt and achieve a masterpiece. In his debut film itself, director Nicolas Pesce shows true class and masterful control of his story as every scene is beautifully laid out and haunting in its own way. All of the myriad ways in which a human being can experience horror, usually expressed as a vivid spectrum of unimaginable suffering inflicted deliberately by and to others, here are excruciatingly detailed on screen. Shot completely in black & white, without dulling the gore or lessening the impact of the violence, and crafted with restraint along with being told in a startling composure, this film is a disquieting, disturbing & demented psychological horror that paints one of the most unsettling portraits of loneliness & perversion that isn’t meant to appease all.

The story follows a girl name Francesca who lives a very isolated life on a farm with her mom and dad. Told in three chapters titled “Mother,” “Father,” and “Family,” it’s a growing-up story gone horribly wrong, with some pronounced psychological overtones. Young Francisca (Olivia Bond) learns from her mother (Diana Agostini), who was once a surgeon in Portugal, about anatomy, dissection, and the similarity between the eyes of cows and of humans. This all seems a bit macabre, but for the most part, they live a quiet life on a farm in the Midwest, and things seem peaceful. That peace is shattered when a stranger named Charlie (Will Brill) shows up and casually forces his way into the house; Francisca’s father (Paul Nazak) returns home to find his wife being viciously murdered. Taking his revenge, her father elects to bury his wife and chain Charlie in the barn after beating him. Francisca goes a step further, both stitching Charlie back together and mutilating him further. Time passes. A now-grown Francisca (Kika Magalhaes) is still tending to the invader, but she’s also clearly deeply lonely. When her father dies, Francisca heads for the barn and brings Charlie — who must have been out there for a decade or more by now — back in. The events continue to spool out with increasing senselessness. Casual torture is, it seems, the only way Francisca can construct some messed-up semblance of a “normal” life, perhaps because she seems stunted by isolation. With no clear explanations for its events, the film is even more terrifying! This film is a beauty to behold from start to finish. To say that this is not a film for everyone would be to put it mildly as the film is too deliberately paced, even at a brisk 76 minutes, to serve a general audience. A series of vignettes unfold the protagonist’s journey from an innocent child to a grown woman who has committed atrocities for the sake of love, and it is a testament to the strength of the storytelling that the film maintains sympathy for the protagonist even as it demonstrates the lengths to which she will go to achieve her ill-defined goals. While there is relatively little gore, some viewers may find the themes in this film disturbing and potentially triggering. What I believe director Pesce may be after here with all his artfully staged unpleasantness, is a vision of how easy it is to warp an impressionable mind during one’s formative years, while still leaving the basic human desires—for love, for sex, for family—completely intact. The film operates, on a faintly affecting level, as a character study of an intensely lonely psychopath; engendering some sympathy for the kind of lunatic a more conventional thriller would simply treat like a boogey woman. Mostly, though, the film just wants to rattle our cages and jangle our nerves. Whether it goes too far in accomplishing that goal—a prolonged depiction of physical and psychological torment in the third act could prove a breaking point—is a matter of twisted sensibility. But there’s no denying that Pesce delivers ugliness with uncommon elegance. The first two-thirds of the film were so strong that I was almost expecting to be let down by the final third.

It seems today that films struggle to be consistently good throughout and usually end up mucking up at least one portion of their story. Instead the film makes the final third its strongest of the lot. One of the things I liked most about this film was that it never insults its viewer. A lot of the story was left up to interpretation. We are given small hints towards things in the dialogue here and there, but must make our own decisions on what the truth actually is. The photography (including sets and locations), sound and editing are excellent, and the music swings between subtle smoothness to powerful Portuguese torch-singing. Keeping everything in black and white and with understated gore that reins it in just shy of a slasher but with enough weirdness to make it a horror and I can’t recall a film that includes a “ghost” with jangling chains. This film will have you asking a lot of questions, from little question to bigger things from early on. Some will get answered, most won’t. Also, much of this film will require you to use your imagination for answers and also, require you to use your imagination for what is happening or did just happen. For me, I liked that. If you don’t, you may hate this film. Let me add that the film does not get shy, it is not trying to censor itself, you will see some sickening and disturbing things at times, even if only briefly. The change over from one scene to another doesn’t always flow as well as it should and some scene changes can be downright jarring in a way that pulls you out of the experience for a moment but you are quickly pulled back in. This was one of my minor issues. It needed some transitioning effects (musically and/or visually) in some way between some of the scenes. However, just because it’s shot in a serene, carefully graded monochrome, the story seems like it could be set anywhere and anytime, existing equally in the past, present, and future. The juxtaposition of violence and serenity is far more disturbing than an unrelenting assault of violence would be. Just when it’s settled down, it starts again. This narrative, inexplicable and fraying at the edges, is what’s so horrifying — which, for aesthetically tuned-in fans of horror, is exactly the point. Modern horror tends to rely incredibly heavily on jump scares. In fact it’s all a lot of them have going for them. There is not a single jump scare in this film and yet it is infinitely more scary and memorable than most of the horror films released today. Films designed to make audiences feel really bad rarely look so good. The mix of English and sub-titled Portuguese is nicely done. Performances are convincing, especially an uplifting provided by Kika Magalhaes‘ downright deranged performance, while the rest of the cast including Will Brill, Flora Diaz, Paul Nazak, Clara Wong, Diana Agostini and Olivia Bond as the younger Francisca play their parts well. On the whole, ‘The Eyes of My Mother’ is a demented, effective and unsettling little art-house horror that paints a disturbing and unsettling portrait about loneliness.