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Eyes Without a Face ~ Film Review
As a lover of horror films, it is important to see beauty in dark places. There is something elegant and graceful about watching something that you don’t normally see. A killer at work or teens banding together to face their attacker; there is beauty in that. With a great horror film, a poetic nature beautifully weaves a great story and the primal fear that goes along with it. Eyes Without a Face is one of the greatest representations of incorporating this beauty.
The story focuses on a father’s desperate desire to reconstruct his daughter’s deformed face. Guilt-ridden due to his involvement in injuring his daughter to begin with (car accident), the father (Dr. Génessier) kidnaps women to graft one face onto another. With the aid of his secretary, Louise, the doctor can continuously kidnap young women and even fake his own daughter’s death in an attempt to avoid detection. While the viewer follows the doctor's steps, it is the daughter herself, Christiane, that drives the story. Hauntingly beautiful, the viewer witnesses the loneliness and isolation of the depressed daughter, much like you view a princess in a high tower. This film is incredibly poetic to the point of being moralistic and representative of childhood fables.
There is something incredibly stoic and cold about Eyes Without a Face. It feels like you are watching something you shouldn’t be seeing…
