The Eyes of My Mother

Shot in elegant widescreen black-and-white, Nicolas Pesce's lurid horror film offers abundant shivers along with a few major jolts. After an opening sequence in which a truck driver stops on a desolate road to aid an injured person, the narrative flashes back to an isolated farmhouse, where a woman teaches her little daughter Francisca useful knowledge—such as how to dissect a cow's eye. The oddly bucolic aura—enhanced by Portuguese fado music—is shattered when a wandering stranger murders the mother in front of the girl. The farmer father returns home to extract a terrible revenge on the killer, which his daughter shares in—using her mother's earlier instructions. After her father's death, the grown-up Francisca (Kika Magalhães) seeks the companionship of others, who tend to meet gruesome fates at her hands, including a young woman with a little son, who Francisca adopts as her own. Although she warns the tyke never to go into the barn, his curiosity wins out, and ultimately the secret that Francisca is hiding there is revealed. The Eyes of My Mother suffers from plot holes, but it also creates a genuinely eerie atmosphere, and in the end has more of an impact than many more elaborate horror films. Recommended. (F. Swietek)