This French sixties horror film is an interesting movie, and quite bizarre. It is based off a book by Jean Redon called, “Les Yeux Sans Visage.”
The premise: a renowned French doctor has his assistant lure college girls with the promise of opportunity– only to kidnap them and surgically remove their faces so that he can transplant them onto his daughter. The problem is, the doctor has a troubling god complex, and the daughter is stifled by high beauty expectations in which she is treated like an outcast and hidden away from the world due to her disfigurement; her father goes so far as to fake her own death. Every time he transplants a face, it rots on her skin, and her hopes of living a normal life are dashed.
The movie has a great score and a beautiful despair about it that leaves your heart in your throat for more than one reason. The acting is good, and the beauty of the French language never gets old; I, personally, don’t mind the subtitles at all. The surgery is a bit funny to watch, and the way it is done is pretty inaccurate, but that adds to the entertainment value.
In addition to this, there are little details that add to the story. The daughter has a fiancé who works with her father as a doctor. The police are corrupt, but they also do an investigation on the doctor. The assistant wears a set of pearls to hide surgery scar. She was a patient of the doctor’s– a success story that feels indebted to him. They throw the bodies into a river. Oh, and she wears an eerie doll mask to cover her face!
This movie is one of my favorites so far, at least in the categories of foreign film and horror. It is quite enchanting, a wonderful view and through any lens, whether it be politics, gender studies, psychology, or just as a plain movie lover, there is a lot to take away and enjoy. Don’t worry, no dogs were harmed in the making of this film!
SPOILER ALERT: there’s a punch of dogs in the back room of her father’s garage. Dogs he uses for his experiments. At the end of the movie, she sets the dogs free and they kill the doctor. This is after she stabs the assistant. In a beautiful flourish of moonlight, she escapes into the woods.
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