The ballad “The Murder of the Lawson Family” by the Stanley Brothers is playing in the car radio when a truck sees an injured and confused woman in the middle of the road. The murder ballad sets the tone of the horror film THE EYES OF MY MOTHER. 27 year old New Yorker Nicholas Pesce has a style that’s somewhere between the German expressionism of the 1920s and the French poetic realism of the 1940s. The black and white images are stark and there’s a bewitching, enchanting mood of madness-inducing loneliness. The story doesn’t quite match what the style promises at first. Francesca is the daughter of Portuguese migrants and lives with her mother and father in an isolated farm in the US. The mother used to be a surgeon and shows her daughter how to remove the eyes from the head of a slaughtered cow. When a serial killer murders the mother, Francesca keeps the killer chained in the shed while her father remains almost completely silent and barely leaves the couch and the TV. Francesca asks the murderer why he did it. He answers “because it feels fantastic.” It goes without saying that Francesca develops from a somewhat weird little girl into a very strange young woman with even stranger interests.
It’s unclear whether certain images in THE EYES OF MY MOTHER are more or less shocking due to them being shown in black and white. A lot of human flesh is handled with different tools and put in the fridge. The character psychology is bumpy to say the least but those who like atmospheric body horror will be very well served here.

Tom Dorow

Translation: Elinor Lewy