The Eyes of My Mother is the quietly disturbing directorial debut from Nicolas Pesce, who also wrote and edited the 2016 black and white film. The movie opens with a young Francisca, who’s enjoying a seemingly ordinary day in the garden with her mother. As the scenes progress, we learn that Francisca’s mother was a surgeon in Portugal, and has since taught her daughter about the normalcy of death and the intricacies of the human anatomy, both of which play important roles throughout the unsettling film. The unassuming afternoon is broken by the arrival of a drifter, who seamlessly transitions from friend to unhinged foe once he has persuaded the unnamed mother to let him enter the house. Her reluctant acceptance sets the rest of the movie into motion, but it is her eerily detached interaction with her daughter that sets the tone for the disturbing events which follow.

Pesce’s debut is refreshingly plot driven, and doesn’t rely on a large musical score, endless dialogue, or shock value scenes. Instead, Pesce wrote his film with sparse, yet affective dialogue. It serves its purpose by developmentally furthering the plot without becoming stale. The scenes are relatively quiet and uncomfortably drawn out throughout the entirety of the film. They are powerful in their simplicity, subtly digging their way underneath the viewer’s skin until an unwelcome tension courses throughout their veins. All violence occurs off camera, but the modest amount of gore which is shown is disconcerting, yet artfully done and integral to the overall story. Thoughtfully chosen camera angles and beautifully simple music are used to draw us into Francisca’s sinister world as an outsider. The viewer is left wanting to help, but unable to do so.

The story continues to unfold at a deliberately gradual pace with a necessarily small number of characters. Francisca’s world is relatively self-contained, but the introduction of these new characters reinforces the fact that she is both lacking the relationship and comfort of others, yet also the ability to properly accept and return them. She does little to seek these out, but once
acquiring them, holds them at a brutal and horrifying distance. In her attempt to heal the trauma from losing her parents, who she so dearly loved despite their lukewarm family dynamic, Francisca goes to extremes to keep what she so desperately needs. While the use of cutaway scenes has the potential to leave viewers visually dissatisfied and devoid of answers, the
director’s style mimics Francisca’s unraveling wellbeing and devolving sense of reality. It is the protagonist’s crushing isolation and her increasingly detached ways to fill it that drive the story, but it’s an unfulfilling one that never quite peaks.

Pesce’s ending is surprisingly abrupt, an unwelcome change compared to the creepily steady rate of the rest of the movie. While it’s heavily implied what happens during the prior cutaway scenes, viewers are left to frustratingly wonder the fates of Francisca and her son with the film’s last one. Having a satisfyingly conclusive ending is a privilege that feels earned after seventy-five minutes of presumptive guesswork. Or at the very least, an ambiguous ending that fits into the character of the collective story. Overall, the execution of the plot was permeated with dark themes, punctuated by affectively minimal dialogue and musical score, as well as unsettling long takes and static camera angles that separate us from Francisca as much as she’s
mentally separated from the few characters who comprise the rest of the plot. I would recommend The Eyes of My Mother to seasoned fans of dramatic horror, not to the casual fan, who relies on stereotypical jump scares and fast paced plots as their source of enjoyment and determining factors for a successfully made horror movie.

About the author

Cristalena Fury is a published horror author and alternative model from the Philadelphia area. She considers herself a metalhead hippie who finds interest in everything dark, disturbing, and gory, with a love of big, black boots and all things chocolate on the side. 

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