Eyes Without a Face (1959)

Plastic surgeons are creepy. Everyone knows that, and Eyes Without a Face (dir. G. Franju) confirms it. If you are looking for a horror movie with no cheap effect - this might be a good pick. Prof. Genessier has specialized in transferring tissue from one person to another. We learn that his daughter's face was demolished in a car crash and the professor himself drove the car. The professor now tries to apply his skills on his daughter (most of the time, we see her wearing a mask) - the living tissue, of course, comes from somewhere. Eyes Without a Face plays with open cards. This is not really a suspense movie. From a very early stage, you know what is going on and how things will play out. Young girls will be picked up (by the prof's lover - his only guinea pig on whom the experiment succeeded; her face is handsome, yet there is something scary about it) and lured into the prof's laboratory, and they will probably not survive. This does not make the film less interesting; what holds my attention throughout the film is the eerie question of what it means to have a face - I mean, what would it mean to imagine that you would have a different face, somebody else's face? Franju's film may not be a philosophical tract on a par with Levinas, but for me, it worked well enough - it's a genuinely creepy film, and it takes some thinking to settle on what is so uncanny or dreadful about all this. It's not that we haven't seen cruel and mad scientists before, but Professor Genessier is not ravingly mad; the camera focuses on his methodical work, the sweat on his brow, his worried gaze. Perhaps it is the absence of typical horror movie conventions that makes this a good film (Franju knows how to handle weird camera angles!), it's lack of suspense, instead playing on a form of ambiguous seeing (when we cannot stop thinking about what is under that mask)? (Horror as seeing what was there all the time, underneath...)