An isolated woman copes with her past troubles in The Eyes of My Mother. As a girl, Francisca (Kika Magalhaes) looked up to her former eye surgeon of a mother. However, her world falls apart as a stranger is let into the house, who brutally murders Francisca’s mother, while she sits idly in the kitchen. Growing up in relative isolation, Francisca copes with her issues in her own unique way.
The Eyes of My Mother is the directorial debut for filmmaker Nicolas Pesce and it follows a somewhat sociopathic woman through her isolated existence in her family home. The story of the film is told in three chapters, each of which features a sizable time jump, which shows how increasingly fractured Francisca’s psyche gets over time, whether it be bathing the corpse of her father or empathizing greatly with her mother’s killer.
One thing that should be said about The Eyes of My Mother is fact it features some exquisitely well shot black and white cinematography, with the film being quite excellent on a technical level. Visually, the film has an aesthetic somewhat similar to something like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. However, the plot of the film moves between being painfully slow and somewhat disturbing and there isn’t really any story to the film, other than it showing the life of a sociopath. I never really cared about any of the characters in this film, which ended up making the film a bit of a chore to watch.
WATCHABLE