How can you tell the difference between art and pornography?
The lighting
The Eyes of My Mother is the latest in the new wave of arthouse horror, a movement that seems to make torture and graphic violence palatable to a higher class of audience through lighting and cinematography. Nicolas Pesce’s debut film uses beautiful and lyrical black and white cinematography to tell a story that adds up to little more than an excuse for graphic violence. While I have very little problem with graphic violence, Pesce is using it to titillate while pretending he’s searching for some deeper meaning in scooped out eyeballs. At least when Nicholas Winding Refn pulled a similar stunt in The Neon Demon, he knew he was entertaining with violence.
When she was a child, Francisca’s life was turned upside down when her mother welcomed a wanderer into the house. Several brutal acts of violence later, Francisca was left traumatized and utterly alone in the world. When she tries to reconnect with the world, the results aren’t pretty.
There really isn’t much to this movie beyond the acts of violence and how gorgeously they’re shot. Almost every frame of this could be hanging on a wall or in a museum. Pesce crafts each image with an almost expressionist lighting scheme that renders a bathroom as the most alien of landscapes. Each piece of violence comes to a final scene, like a painter finishing his a painting and then moving on to the next one. The languid pacing is almost hypnotic, lulling the audience into a sense that they’re watching something beautiful, rather than horrific.
Unfortunately, this is also the same new wave that thinks languid pacing is frightening in and of itself. Though running a short 77 minutes, The Eyes of My Mother is still a slog to sit through. In no small part, it’s because Pesce almost seems to be trying to Make A Statement on something, but there’s nothing deeper here. This is a bunch of silly graphic horrific torture porn that just happens to look nice and appeal to certain types of sensibilities who would normally reject the same script if it had a bit of zip and pizzazz to it. But, in the end, it’s just tortureporn with a good lighting director and cinematographer.
