Beautiful and disturbing.
From the first moments through the last, The Eyes of My Mother proves to be a disturbing, unsettling film. Written and directed by Nicolas Pesce, the black and white images which float across the screen will stay with you long after the credits roll.
The Eyes of My Mother is a film which works on many levels. While the story may sound relatively basic when written out, there is a power in seeing—and listening—as it unfolds.
Briefly, The Eyes of My Mother tells the story of Francisca, who lives with her mother (Diana Agonstini) and father (Paul Nazak) out in the country. Francisca's mother was an eye surgeon in Portugal and passes some of that knowledge on to young Francisca (Olivia Bond). When a door-to-door salesman comes by the house (Will Brill, with crazy-eyed wonder), the lives of the family are changed forever. We see this in greater detail when the movie jumps years ahead to an older Francisca (now played by Kika Malgahães), living alone in the same house and still dealing with those changes.
The best classification for The Eyes of My Mother may be as a horror film, but it is not one that revels in blood and guts and disgusting imagery. Without a doubt, there is some blood, but Pesce avoids depicting the most gruesome bits. Death and awful things do take place, but the movie is so incredibly focused on Francisca and how she views any of these horrors, what she gleans from them, that an audience is as entranced as they are disgusted.
To describe it all as beautiful may sound odd, but it's right. The black and white imagery (Zach Kuperstein is the director of photography), the music (with a score by Ariel Loh), the sparseness of the dialogue, the stilted nature of the relationships, and more combine to make a movie which feels beautiful while remaining horrifying.
In one particularly telling scene, Francisca is dancing alone in her house. We have seen her dance there previously, as a child with her father, but as an adult she does it by herself. The dance itself is beautiful and it is sad to see her dancing alone, but more than that, after the terrible things that have already happened in the movie—with more sure to come—Francisca dancing alone in this house is both unnerving and yet somehow almost peaceful.
Much of The Eyes of My Mother revolves around this question of Francisca herself, and just who she is. While one day may have firmly set her on a path, was she always destined to head in that direction? Is she mainly a product of that one day or something more? How much did her mother's lessons play into Francisca's choices?
Malgahães portrays Francisca perfectly. She offers a naiveté and a longing for the childhood which has passed her by combined with something harder, more sinister, lying underneath. This isn't entirely split into the two distinct, opposing sides either. Many individual actions taken by Francisca are perfectly blended products of both the lighter and darker aspects of her personality.
One of the reasons this works goes back to Pesce not depicting as much of the blood and guts of the story as he might. There is enough there so that the audience is aware of it, but not so much that it becomes the focus – that would throw Malgahães' work as Francisca too far to one side or the other.
Finally, Pesce also offers up an ending which could be multiple things and does so in a way that it certainly makes for an end to this tale, but perhaps not an end to a larger story. Like everything else in the movie, it seems clear but maybe is not quite as clear as we imagine.
There are moments when the sparse nature of the storytelling, the lack of overt explanations, does detract from the whole rather than support it. Francisca's father is too much of a mystery. This can be seen as the movie telling us that he is a unknown quantity even to his daughter, however that still doesn't feel like enough, especially as the audience is trying to search for answers about Francisca.
The Verdict
The Eyes of My Mother is a considered bit of filmmaking. Whether or not the audience accepts everything that is given to them, each and every moment, each and every shot, each and every sound, feels deliberately executed in order to serve the whole. It is a movie which both lays its main character bare and somehow keeps her concealed at the same time. We think we know why Francisca is who Francisca is, and why she does what she does, but do we really? The questions will keep coming and whether or not answers arrive, it still feels worth thinking about.
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