The Eyes Of My Mother (2016)

The Eyes Of My Mother (2016)

Imdb Rating 6.3/10

Director: Nicolas Pesce

Writer: Nicolas Pesce

Stars: Kika Magalhaes, Will Brill, Olivia Bond

R | 1h 16min | Drama, Horror

Story line

In their secluded farmhouse, a mother, formerly a surgeon in Portugal, teaches her daughter, Francisca, to understand anatomy and be unfazed by death. One afternoon, a mysterious visitor shatters the idyll of Francisca's family life, deeply traumatizing the young girl, but also awakening unique curiosities. Though she clings to her increasingly reticent father, Francisca's loneliness and scarred nature converge years later when her longing to connect with the world around her takes on a dark form

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★☆☆☆☆

Squelchy, silly revenge horror

Almodóvar meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – but without the finesse – in this out-to-lunch black-and-white horror 

Unexpected tales of macabre violence and intrigue in a rural American setting are nothing new. The innocent-looking house or barn harbouring horror and gore is as much a part of US film-making as the romcom. But it’s possible the trope has never seemed as weird as this. Director Nicolas Pesce’s tale about a country-dwelling family strikes an uncomfortable note from the first scene.

A stranger (Will Brill) approaches the idyllic home of an American-Portuguese family, and once he’s managed to worm his way into the house he kills the family’s matriarch in the bath tub. From there things develop into something that sits between Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as the father returns to seek vengeance, finally deciding to chain the attacker up in their barn.

Scenes have next to no dialogue as the family of two, played by Paul Nazak and Kika Magalhaes, share short exchanges, with Annie (Magalhaes) tending to their hostage. From its black-and-white presentation to its minimalist construction the film cries out arthouse, but there’s a sense it’s trying way too hard.

Scenes that should be shocking end up being strangely comical, like when Annie – now fully grown – picks up a woman at a bar (Clara Wong) and tells her matter-of-factly that she killed her father and enjoys dissecting cows’ eyes, before murdering her and putting the body parts in the fridge. When the man who murdered her mother tries to escape, she captures him and kills him softly, hugging, kissing and stabbing him all at the same time, the incisions accompanied by squelching that makes the whole thing hard to take seriously.

Annie’s antics escalate and once she’s got no one else to talk to (because she’s killed everyone) she tries to find new victims. From the first moment she is picked up by a woman with a baby, it’s obvious where things are going. Annie has another captive and now a child to raise as her own and presumably teach the pleasures of kidnapping and torture.

What’s never really presented is the motivation. Why is Annie running around stabbing everything in sight? How did her victim survive in a barn wearing nothing but a loincloth for several years? Pesce asks viewers to go along with the absurdity while offering nothing to justify any of it. It’s a murder ballad gone out of tune.

 Read full review at The Guardian

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Movie Rating ★★✬☆☆

Horror fable may leave you with nightmares  

Serial murder has rarely seemed a more melancholy calling than it does in "The Eyes of My Mother," a short, decidedly unsweet and wholly startling vision from freshman writer-director Nicolas Pesce. Meshing an especially bloody strain of slasher pic with the most whispery of high-art sensibilities, this tale of a young Portuguese-American woman drawn — by way of misused heritage and scarring personal tragedy — into severely psychotic behavior represents an exquisite waking nightmare, its meticulous monochrome imagery caressing the eye even as the filmmaker brandishes a scalpel before it. A characteristically cold cut from the ever-exciting Borderline Films, this may, with its stretches of silent storytelling and fado-laced soundtrack, be a tad too lyrical for hard-horror fans.

"Never go in the barn," a woman solemnly warns her child midway through the film. It's a line seemingly plucked from a fairy tale, and for all its very adult interlacing of sadism and sensuality, "The Eyes of My Mother" does maintain a child's-eye view of threat as its protagonist comes of age. Pesce's heartland Gothic visuals — specifically the very inky expanses of Zach Kuperstein's glorious widescreen cinematography — conjure spooked memories of Charles Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter." In early scenes, meanwhile, as protagonist Francisca is introduced in the girlhood form of striking newcomer Olivia Bond, it's not just the young actress's dark, concentrated gaze that recalls Ana Torrent in "The Spirit of the Beehive"; both films probe children's repulsed fascination with the monstrous, though "Eyes" literalizes the terror in the barn rather more emphatically than Victor Erice's 1973 classic.

Pesce plays a currently vogueish structural trick at the outset of the film, opening with an isolated fragment from a far later point in the action — though the flash-forward works effectively to further muddy the narrative's hazy blurring of time and identity. Though the picture is neatly divided into three chapters — cryptically titled "Mother," "Father" and "Family" — following its out-of-sync prologue, disorienting chronological leaps occur not just between but within them, with viewers left to assemble just what has come to pass in the unseen periods. Pesce's spare script doesn't seek to obscure, but its quiet, matter-of-fact handling of drastic dramatic events will catch some off-guard.

Francisca is introduced as a wide-eyed naif, in thrall to her Portuguese mother (Diana Agostini) as she is taught the legend of Francis of Assissi — absorbing a message of gentle kindness to all creatures that is rather rudely contravened when Mom subsequently, and with notable sangfroid, shows her daughter how to dissect a cow's eye on the kitchen table. (Ommetaphobes should be warned, if the title doesn't tip them off, that they're in for one of the squirmiest sits in a movie theater since Bunuel's "Un chien andalou.") We learn, in what turns out to be a salient detail, that Francisca's mother was a surgeon in her homeland before taking up the life of a Midwestern farm wife. This already eerily tainted impression of bucolic childhood takes a significant turn for the worse when a wild-eyed stranger (Will Brill) turns up at the farmhouse and unceremoniously performs a vicious act of violence before the impressionable girl.

The film's ensuing escalation of torture and trauma — seemingly stemming from this incident, though perhaps embedded more deeply in the protagonist's personal history — shouldn't be divulged in too much detail. It's fair to say, however, that Francisca grows into a young woman (Portuguese actress Kika Magalhaes, passively transfixing throughout) with an ingenue's curiosity regarding the body and pansexual desire, and a brute streak that belies her outward innocence. Pesce ventures into upsetting extremes of human violation and suffering, though there's enough complex psychological grounding even to the film's grisliest setpieces to fend off accusations of exploitation or torture porn. As played with supple, mournful grace by Magalhaes (a former dancer, imbuing the role with a kind of swaying, uncanny physicality), Francisca remains perversely sympathetic even through her most severely inscrutable of actions.

 Read full review at Chicago Tribune

 

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Intense Portuguese actress Kika Magalhaes fronts this debut feature from music video director Nicolas Pesce

A grizzly tale of American Gothic served up with an unexpected dash of moodily melodic Portuguese fado, The Eyes of My Mother is both strange and strangely enthralling. Shot, digitally, in beautifully composed black-and-white, this darkly comic feature about a young girl growing up in violent times is set on an isolated American farm that looks like it could be just down the road from where Charles Laughton’s classic and equally unclassifiable The Night of the Hunter was set. Though this won’t be any distributor’s idea of a surefire commercial hit, a small boutique operation should consider investing in a relationship with music video prodigy Nicolas Pesce, a clear talent who makes his feature debut here and whom the industry should keep an eye on.

The beauty of the film — as well as one of the main reasons most mainstream audiences will resist it — is that it’s not very dialogue-heavy and refuses to connect the dots between one scene and the next too explicitly, leaving it up to the viewers to draw their own conclusions.

After an enigmatic opening that the narrative will circle back to later, the film’s first part, called Mother, focuses on a cute and innocent-seeming little girl, Francisca (Olivia Bond), who lives with her Portuguese mother (Diana Agostini), a former surgeon, and father (Paul Nazak) on an isolated cattle farm in an unspecified time and place (the film was shot in Cooperstown, New York). An eerie-looking and oddly acting stranger called Charlie (Will Brill) insinuates his way into the house when Dad isn’t home and commits a horrible crime in front of the little girl

Parts two and three, named Father and Family, respectively, jump ahead in time, when Francisca has become a young woman (Kika Magalhaes) with a child, Antonio (Joey Curtis-Green). Her behavior has also become extremely violent. Clearly, she’s been traumatized by what she experienced as a little girl and has lacked moral guidance in her life (it’s never clear if she’s ever even been to school, though both she and Antonio speak fluent English and Portuguese). 

Pesce cleverly keeps most of the actual violence offscreen, with sound effects, suggestive cuts and outwardly quiet but entirely horrifying images — such as little Francisca mopping blood off a tiled floor — doing most of the heavy lifting. What slowly emerges is a sense of the problematic psychological makeup of Francisca, who has had to grow up after not only an enormously traumatic experience but also without any role models. This seems to have led her to simply copy the behavior of the adults around her, including the deranged Charlie and her aging father, whose methods of dealing with monsters isn’t exactly what could be described as gentle, either.

There are some frisson-inducing moments of poetry as well, often set to the heartfelt, slow-burning wails of Portuguese fado superstar Amalia Rodrigues. These quieter moments help make sense of what Francisca must be thinking and feeling. They include a masterful overhead shot in which the protagonist tries to get into the tub with the corpse of her father while she laments her loneliness after his death. It is twinned with a moment of maternal embrace, later in the film, that’s feels like it could have come straight out of Edgar Allen Poe. Ariel Loh’s minimalist, quietly sinister score helps to further suggest the right tone in several key scenes, though Pesce isn't afraid of pregnant silences in the least. 

The contribution of cinematographer Zach Kuperstein, with his precise framing and his and Pesce’s sharp sense of mise-en-scene, can also not be underestimated. If anything, naysayers will suggest the film is an exercise in style that lacks an easily identifiable narrative throughline or likeable protagonist, though champions can counter that that says more about their unwillingness or inability to enter into a dialogue with the film’s rich gallery of images, sounds and sensations than anything about the film’s inherent qualities. Hopefully, post-screening discussions over the film will at least stay civilized and everyone will leave their saws, knives, needles and shackles at home. Those things can get you in a right mess.

 Read full review at Hollywood Reporter

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