The Eyes Of My Mother. Official Review, trailer and stills.

The Eyes Of My Mother is a very unsettling exploration of a young innocent girl being exposed to, extreme family behaviour, violent robbery, unflinching cruelty and eventually murder. Who then embraces her lessons in dissection that were taught practically to her by her vampiric looking mother on their remote farm, so well that she dutifully fulfils her mother's un-achieved ambition after her death, which was to dissect humans.

Kika Magalhaes in The Eyes Of My Mother, a Magnet Release. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing

Indeed this is what is played out and fairly graphically throughout but not continually, the pace and placing is so well timed and structured, you will have experienced something intense before it's too late to turn your head. combined with very long sections of the film having no dialogue at all, that are just pure suspense and atmosphere building, your jangled imagination will be swept away early on by the events and visuals, including the superb black and white photography.

I would hazard a guess and say, audiences of contemporary and classic horror cinema might say "no way" early on and look at their remotes after about 25 minutes because of the severe learning curve of nerve shredding uncertain to come horror that is exerted on you as a viewer by about this time, which i might add is expertly applied by director Nicholas Pesce.

Director Nicolas Pesce.

Everything is extremely well crafted, shockingly so, as certain cinema taboos are swept a side, one by one. Seasoned horror movie fans will notice all the nods to other way point horror films like "Psycho", "Unhinged" "Happy Birthday To Me", "Deranged" and "Don't Go In The House". In fact the creepy old house and surroundings are as much a part as the cast themselves, I found it very enjoyable for these elements, once the bar of terror's level had been set.

Official trailer The Eyes Of My Mother.

The cinematography, style and production do not feel or look like a Stateside movie, apart from it's setting, it has a very European and Far Eastern, Japanese look on occasion. These are deliberately executed and very picturesque replications of intentional, I believe attempts to say "These are some of the inspirational films I as a director am trying to reproduce or would like to re-make". If that is indeed the case, all I can say is yes, I definitely thought so and I am the convinced converted.


You will be asking many questions to yourself as to the possibilities of when and why all this strangeness is unfolding, is it the sixties or early seventies, it is never really made clear, not that is at all necessary to know, from the start you kind of hit the ground running and from there on in you are at the mercy of the cast and crew. When it is over, there even more questions hanging in the air for at least a few days afterwards and if you do stay with it till the last seconds, a few boundaries so far as what is considered acceptable within a horror film will have been tastefully crossed.


The most effective and enjoyable new horror film I seen since The VVitch.