With each passing of her mother and father, an isolated young girl falls deeper into a lonely world of pain, torture and murder.
Presented to you in classic black and white, director Nicolas Pesce’s The Eyes of My Mother pays its respects to the greats.
With traces of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) here and there, Eyes also carries with it an unsettling creepiness that is much akin to 1979’s Don’t Go In The House or 1974’s Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile. My, my, my – look where Ed Gein has led us!
The cinematography is certainly interesting, switching from fly-on-the-wall one second to bird’s eye view in another. But the shots that work best are those that make you feel as if you are watching a moving painting. Everything seems so carefully put into place. Like Wes Anderson but without the symmetry and quick cuts.
Needless to say, I’m seeing a lot of inspiration here, but more than once I have questioned if I’m seeing any depth beyond a handsomely filmed picture and a handful of tributes.
This is something that has puzzled me in recent times. In a genre whose audience is screaming out for originality, and altogether doubting the existence thereof – isn’t it about time we stopped giving the movies that pay heavy homage to the same old 60s, 70s and 80s classics a free pass? How many slashers can we forgive just because they honour Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) before it all starts to feel a little hypocritical?
LAST WORDS:
I enjoyed this movie. But was there a point to it? Not really. Will I take anything away from it? Sadly not. That’s not to say it should be dismissed. At least it looks pretty…when it’s not being ugly.