60
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.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
90
A masterpiece of poetic horror and tactful, tactile brutality.
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.
88
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Franju constructs an elegant visual work; here is a horror movie in which the shrieks are not by the characters but by the images.
100
There’s no other movie quite like it.
67
Portland Oregonian by Shawn Levy
Franju conjures images -- sometimes gory, sometimes poetic, sometimes fantastical -- that genuinely haunt: the essence of the cinema distilled.
88
Eyes Without a Face, outre as it is, never tires as hypnotic, touching, ghastly fun.
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.
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.