REVIEW

The Eyes of My Mother

The virtues of writer-director Nicolas Pesce’s debut feature are readily apparent. The Eyes of My Mother looks fantastic, shot in a shadowy black-and-white that evokes the nightmare-inducing TV shows of the late ’50s and early ’60s (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits) as much as Ingmar Bergman. It doesn’t get bogged down in dialogue or make any sort of attempt to explain the cruel pathology of its characters. For an arty, brutal arthouse project it’s admirably lean and brisk.

The Eyes of My Mother

78 Cast: Diana Agostini, Olivia Bond, Will Brill, Joey Curtis-Green, Flora Diaz, Kika Magalhaes, Paul Nazak, Clara Wong

Director: Nicolas Pesce Rating: R, for disturbing violent content and behavior, and brief nudity

Running time: 1 hour, 16 minutes

In English and Portuguese with English subtitles

But the trouble is, it doesn’t really have anything to say, other than you can’t really ever know what’s going on inside that pretty little head of hers. We might attribute the protagonist’s murderous behavior to her weird childhood or the viciousness that plays out in the film’s opening moments, but there’s no internal logic underpinning her actions. As they say in small towns all over America, it’s just her way.

At least I assume it is the rustic farmhouse Francisca (played as a little girl by Olivia Bond and as a young woman by Kika Magalhaes) grows up in with her mother (Diana Agostini) and father (Paul Nazak). All we really know is it’s remote from civilization, and that it is decorated in a kind of timeless downward-slipping fashion. If not for the vehicles and the buzz of a midcentury television set, it could be set anytime between the 1870s and last week.

And, in the way of all young artists smart enough to know they haven’t got that much to say, Pesce effectively suppresses all emotion, allowing us to fill in the blanks, cheating toward a depth that simply isn’t there. A flashback delivers us to the scene of a bizarre home invasion, which leaves Francisca’s mother — who, we are informed was once a doctor in her native Portugal and has given her daughter some anatomy lessons — dead and her assailant (Will Brill) wounded. When her father returns home, they bury Mom, and for obscure reasons, chain her murderer in their barn. They remove his eyes and vocal cords, presumably so he can serve as Francisca’s pet.

Then father dies, and like Norman Bates before her, Francisca preserves his body. And gets up to other nasty stuff.

Obviously this is a film by a guy who had some startling visual ideas — Pesce forces perspective by putting his camera in odd places and sometimes this works to discomfit and disorient the viewer — and very little clue as to how to tell a compelling story. The result is an icy and at times inane exercise in impassive horror. The closest Pesce gets to something human is his unnerving, lingering gaze on the face of a woman Francisca tortures. (Why? Because that is what she does.)

In the end, you see the promise and the influences (Michael Haneke, The Night of the Hunter) while being annoyed by the ultimate emptiness of the project. Never has a 76-minute movie seemed so slow. And rarely has a promising young director seemed so compromised by a dull, smug script.

The Eyes of My Mother is out today on many video-on-demand services.

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