Review of The Eyes of My Mother (2016) by Olivier B — 11 Dec 2016

The Eyes of My Mother is a directorial debut from Nicolas Pesce and for a first feature length movie, this is quite an achievement! The story follows one ordinary family living their lives as normal as they can.

A father, a mother and a daughter is what the family consists of. The mother used to be an eye surgeon back in Portugal so she transfers this knowledge to her daughter through a few really oddly disturbing scenes involing a cow's head.

One day, a thief comes to their house and kills the mother. The father then disables the thief and the father, along with her daughter, keep him chained up in their barn. From that moment on, everything changes and we see years pass in the daughter's life and how she survives.

I was very surprised by how beautifully tragic this movie was. It never becomes a gore-fest, but there's always something violent and/or disturbing happening. Pesce directed this movie brilliantly! Everything is in a black & white filter which adds to the overall tragic tone of the movie, there is also little to no soundtrack.

Francisca, the daughter, leads a very weird life after the death of her mother. It would really be a shame if you spoil yourself of the surprises which are to come (I've not even watched the trailer), so I'll just say that it's very unpredictable and shocking.

As I've said, there's not much gore in this movie, what we see is mostly the aftermath of the violent occurences, the director always cuts away quickly from anything violent and that makes the movie seem more focused on the story.

There's many movies today which try to deliver shock and terror through violent imagery, but they forget that too much of that can make the overall experience tiresome and boring (the best example would be any Rob Zombie movie, especially his latest garbage, 31).

The Eyes of My Mother keeps the gore to a minimum, but it still has that disturbing and brutal feel to it. I think this was a great decision by the director. What also must be noted is the performance of Kika Magalhaes, older Francisca.

She's terrific in this role and towards the end of the movie, despite everything she did, you actually feel sorry for her. Speaking of the ending, it isn't very straightforward. It has that "multiple ending" feel to it, and the outcome is left for the audience to decide what actually happened.

As for flaws, I think there's only one. The movie at moments does tend to feel a bit slow. I believe it was meant to be this way to add to the 'dreamy' feeling of the entire movie, make it seem like one big nightmare, but still, I felt a sleepy at a few moments.

One of the most impressive scenes is the scene where we see Francisca dancing when she is young, and then later in the movie we see her dance in her older age. The contrast between those two scenes is fantastic and I love how the director showed us her change of pace in life.

All in all, The Eyes of My Mother is a great horror debut with terrific performances, truly shocking moments and an overall creepy and dreamy tone. I'd highly recommend checking this movie out, though some will definitely say the movie is too artsy, although I don't consider that to be a flaw.