Review of Eyes Without a Face (1960) by Douglas L — 25 Nov 2012

This absolutely gorgeous French art-house masterwork is a truly influential horror film with the minimalist style of Hitchcock.

The film opens with a woman driving nervously at night, her white face illuminated. In the back seat is a corpse, hunched grimly and obscured with a slumped hat and bulky overcoat. In a completely unsettling scene, the woman is dragging the body to dispose of it in a river; we see the perfectly white legs exposed eerily in the blackness as they trail, limply and lifelessly, from the bottom of the overcoat.

It turns out that this woman, Louise, is an assistant to Dr. Genessier, a brilliant doctor who is working on a full face transplant (heterograft). The doctor's daughter, Christiane, was horribly disfigured in a car accident that he was responsible for. Ever since, Christiane has been forced to wear a very creepy mask while her father captures girls and attempts to graft their faces on to hers. This mask is even more chilling than the brief, blurry glimpse that we get of Christiane's ruined face: it is white and plain, fitting exactly to the contours of her face while leaving only the haunting, unwavering and deeply expressive eyes peering from the whiteness. The corpse that was being dumped at the beginning was one of Genessier's first victims, and there are certainly more on the way. We eventually see the doctor perform a heterograft; as he sweats profusely and traces terribly uneven lines around the subject's face, it becomes clear that he really isn't very good at it. The viewer may cringe as the scalpel slices into flesh, and the film's most gruesome scene shows the bloodied skin being carefully lifted from the face to expose, if but for a few seconds, the hideous mess underneath.

The soundtrack to Eyes Without a Face, like everything else in this film, is flawless. The unnerving, sinister atmosphere is juxtaposed by the calm, dreamlike classical score that weaves and flows throughout the exquisite stairways of Genessier's mansion. All the while, the cinematography is literally perfect, and clearly demands the upmost attention of the viewer to properly appreciate every gorgeously composed black-and white shot. There are certain powerful subtleties, such as a chilling scene in which Christiane's pallid fingers stroke the face of an unconscious victim, which should not be missed. The surreal uncomfortableness is further heightened by the nearly-constant drone of barking dogs in the background. Just be prepared for numerous shots of people walking up and down stairs.

Eyes Without a Face is a brilliant, hypnotic film that uses minimal gore and an expert attention to detail. It blends nightmarish surrealism with striking, thought-provoking elements to result in one of the essential art horror movies of all time.