31 Days of Horror- Day 7: The Eyes of My Mother (2016)

(dir. Nicholas Pesce)

Magnet Releasing

A lonely young woman struggles to reconnect with her murdered mother by picking up her talent for surgery.

The black and white presentation of Nicholas Pesce’s The Eyes of my Mother suggests a kind of elegance traditionally reserved within the genre for a statement on classic horror or the neo-noir thriller. Modern black and white presentations within horror are often a deliberate tool used for callbacks or the suggestion of Hitchcockian suspense. And The Eyes of my Mother, with its lonely, psychologically fractured, and mother-obsessed protagonist clearly owes some of its identity to Psycho. But the fact that the protagonist is a woman makes all the difference in terms of the film’s originality, and black and white is a key part of that. It suggests, much like Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 black and white film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the existence of loneliness within the shadows, of a sharp contrast between the black and white, the figures and the places they cannot go. Like Amirpour’s film, Pesce’s is a story about an outsider, one who fights against the suggestion of powerlessness within her gender by placing some measure of control in her own hands. In The Eyes of my Mother, there is a precision that black and white evokes, a surgical separation through which we are able to glean some sense of Francisca’s world, a world black and white, life and death, and herself as the grey shadow tying them together.

In its opening moments, The Eyes of my Mother feels like a sibling of Flannery O’Connor’s southern gothic. A picturesque farm, a well-manner stranger, and a violent, shocking act, each culminating in the ruination of innocence and the awakening of despair. The first time we see what Francisca has done to her mother’s killer, Charlie, in the years after the murder, we’re treated to the suggestion of the violence done, but the violent act itself has been withheld. Seeing Charlie, chained in the barn, his empty eye sockets blindfolded and his vocal cords cut create a startling image of a monster rather than a victim. Because we know that he killed Francisca’s mother in the film’s opening (though we don’t see that act either) our sympathy for him is muted. And because we didn’t see Francisca torture him, create his suffering, then he becomes a monster birthed from the dark of the barn, rather than a suffering human being. Pesce plays with these notions of humanity and monstrosity throughout the film, cutting away from Francisca’s acts of violence and only showing us the aftermath to the effect of preserving her humanity. Despite that, Kika Magahlaes plays Francisca with a level of detachment that’s alien. Every brief social encounter is an act of dipping a toe into a murky pool, testing what normal human response should be. There’s a delicacy to the way she operates, and despite the gruesome modifications she performs, there’s a beauty to them as well that creates a visceral ache. The film, divided into three acts, presents us with increasingly unhinged, though subtly crafted, looks at Francisca that challenge our sympathies. Narratively, Francisca’s acts are reactions to grief. But under the surface is the suggestion that this is who she was meant to become even before her mother’s death, and that the innocent girl bound to the teaching of Saint Francis of Assisi, only existed in her mother’s eyes. Francisca's fascination with a dead field mouse at the beggining of the film suggests that sinsiter disconnect from life early on. Francisca’s struggle to end her loneliness is in part an attempt to regain her innocence in the eyes of others: her father, a brief potential lover, and a son adopted through nefarious means. Each offer a failed opportunity for her to be seen as she’d perhaps like to be seen, rather than who she is.

Scare Factor 4/5 The Eyes of my Mother is a prime example of a film that’s impactful not only because of what it’s about, but how it’s about. The filmmaking choices and carefully crafted lead performance turn a seemingly simple narrative into a tense, poetic expression of inner and outward pain that works like a scalpel in the stomach.

*Available to watch on Netflix