The Eyes Of My Mother: Little Girl Lost

In films, evil is easy. It isn’t hard to come up with something or someone evil in fiction because you’re the one describing the character, and if you want to make the sum total of their existence that they are evil, you can do that. But that’s not always especially interesting, I don’t think. Sometimes it’s absolutely fine, and heaven knows I do hate excessive backstory and explanation in horror films, but to contradict myself, I also think there’s worth in creating a monster that is more than its monstrosity. So often in life, the people we would call evil are not just evil, their evil comes from human desires and needs and weaknesses, and exploring the tension between the universality of the monster’s desires and the singularity of how they go about achieving them can yield really interesting results.

Consider, for example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - the monster does monstrous things, but it also has a mind and an interior life, one preoccupied with the same things so many of us struggle with. Outside of fiction, the serial murderers Jeffery Dahmer and Ed Gein did terrible, terrible things - things beyond the pale of typical human conduct - but were also both by all accounts lonely and awkward, and did the terrible things they did to try and fulfill some basic human need for companionship in the only ways that made sense to them, given their inability to assign value to human life.

It’s that intersection of loneliness and utter absence of anything like a moral compass that gives The Eyes Of My Mother its stark, unsettling power.

This is the story of Francisca, a little girl who lives with her mother and father out in the country. Francisca’s mother was an eye surgeon back in Portugal, and when one of the cows they keep dies, she has Francisca practice dissection on it. She’s teaching her daughter what she knows. Francisca’s father is a silent presence who moves through the house, sometimes drives into town to run errands.

On one of these occasions, while her father is away, a young man comes to visit Francisca and her mother. They’re out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s just Francisca and her mother, and this young man. The young man is pleasant enough, but he smiles a little too widely.

By the time her father returns home, it’s too late. Francisca’s mother is dead.

From here, we follow Francisca as she grows up, in this house in the middle of the country. It’s her and her profoundly repressed father, living with the constant reminder of their traumatizing loss. They don’t talk about what happened. They don’t talk at all, and the rest of the film is largely occupied with the things Francisca does to feel less lonely in this stiflingly lonely environment. It’s hard to say much more about the film without giving it away - it’s not that the story really has twists, it’s just that so much of the film’s impact lies in what happens, what new turn Francisca’s quest to no longer be alone is going to take, that to recount much of it takes away a lot of the movie. However, it’s clear within the first ten or fifteen minutes that there’s something really wrong with her, probably was even before she lost her mother, and the rest is just a matter of what new shapes it takes as she grows up and where it’s all going to lead.

And this is what makes this film as powerful as it is, I think - it manages the very tricky balance of eliciting some kind of sympathy for Francisca while not at all diluting the horror of what she’s doing. Take a young girl who grows up with a surgeon’s detachment toward the body, an emotionally distant father, and a mother taken from her too soon through a shocking, awful act of violence that she witnesses, and something is going to snap deep down. Francisca never really had the chance to learn how to relate to other people, and she’s trying her best with the tools she has at her disposal, but those tools lead to awful ends. We can respond to her profound loneliness and inability to connect with other people, her utter brokenness, but how she’s chosen to cope with it is monstrous.

This by itself could end up overheated and lurid and kind of tedious. I mean, at worst this could basically be a Lifetime Original Movie with gore. But, much to my delight, this is instead yet another in the run of films I’ve written about recently that brings a strong, assured sense of composition to the table. It’s really, really nice to be able to write about horror films and be able to talk about editing and sound design and cinematography on a level beyond “there is sound and lighting and the camera is pointed at people.” I know at some point the streak will run out, but this is yet another horror film that feels like a film. Between being shot in black and white, effective use of chiaroscuro, and a largely affectless acting style, it feels a lot like David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Like that film it’s centered largely in one location, in a world where emotions don’t really get expressed and there are lots of long, awkward silences. Wide shots punctuate the film, with people dwarfed against the world, clouds and trees and four walls pressing down on them. Everything is very still, until it isn’t. Shots tends to be long and cuts between them sudden, and all of this - the cinematic style, the spare but effective use of largely ambient music, and the characterization all come together to create a supremely uneasy experience.

There’s a real sense of restraint (and when to abandon it) at work here. In general, this film does a lot with suggestion - it doesn’t shy away from violence, but doesn’t linger on it either. Quick edits just before something awful happens cut to the immediate aftermath, meaning we get just enough to fill in the blanks a lot of the time. A conversation will start to go wrong, you can sense things turning, and then we cut immediately to Francisca scrubbing the floor yet again. It tells you everything you need to know without showing it to you, which makes the times the film doesn’t look away that much more powerful. Throughout, the violence is presented dispassionately, but somehow this just makes it worse - this, combined with an immediate immersion into Francisca’s dysfunction (as well as having seen firsthand exactly where it comes from) creates this deeply uneasy feeling where we’re never permitted the luxury of dehumanizing Francisca, but neither are we spared the horror of her day to day life. We have to feel both, and it’s as disturbing as the suffocating, monochromatic world in which it all takes place. The one thing that didn’t quite land for me was an ending that feels a little abrupt and a little anticlimactic, but it’s the kind of end that feels inevitable given what we’ve seen, and it’s entirely consistent with the mood of the film overall. What Francisca does is horrible, but she isn’t doing it to be horrible. She’s doing it because this is how she grew up, this is the only thing she knows, and nobody was ever really around to teach her any different. Her life is drab and gray and filled with horrors, but because it’s all she knows, they aren’t horrors to her. They’re friends.

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