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Eyes Without a Face(Les Yeux sans visage)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

France, Italy · 1960
1h 24m
Director Georges Franju
Starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, Alexandre Rignault
Genre Drama, Horror, Thriller

After causing an accident that left his daughter severely disfigured, Dr. Génessier is riddled with guilt. Determined to restore her beauty, he and his loyal assistant, Louise, kidnap young women and perform face transplants on them, all of which have been unsuccessful. Beauty has painful consequences and a dark price in this eerie classic.

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What are people saying?

Pico Banerjee Profile picture for Pico Banerjee

Oh boy, what a film. Eyes Without a Face was made in a time of rampant paranoia regarding plastic surgery, serious interrogation about humanity's relationship to technology, and what human nature is in the postwar world. It was also made when the horror movie, as a respectable genre, was first beginning to garner mainstream attention, releasing in the same year as Hitchcock's masterful Psycho. Eyes Without a Face, though not as shocking today, remains a must-watch for people interested in classic horror films that pushed the limits of censorship and that integrated the artistic styles of the 1920s-40s onto a stereoscopic landscape.

Kelsey Thomas Profile picture for Kelsey Thomas

A pretty suspenseful and visually shocking horror for 1960. I appreciated the modest runtime but think the side characters could have been pushed a bit more to the, well, side, in favor of the doctor and his daughter.

What are critics saying?

60

Variety by

Director Georges Franju has given this some suspense and not spared any shock details. But the stilted acting, asides to explain characters and motivations, and a repetition of effects lose the initial impact.

90

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

As absurd and as beautiful as a fairy tale, this chilling, nocturnal black-and-white masterpiece was originally released in this country dubbed and under the title "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus," but it's much too elegant to warrant the usual "psychotronic" treatment.

100

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

Disturbing, disorienting, quietly terrifying, it's one of the least known of the world's great horror movies and, in its own dark way, a startlingly beautiful and artful piece of cinema as well.

67

Portland Oregonian by Shawn Levy

Franju conjures images -- sometimes gory, sometimes poetic, sometimes fantastical -- that genuinely haunt: the essence of the cinema distilled.

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