Review #236: Eyes Without a Face (1962)

This review was originally written in October 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #90: Eyes Without a Face (1962)

Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage) is a French film about a surgeon, Dr. Génessier, whose daughter, Christiane, had her face disfigured in an automobile accident. With the help of his assistant Louise, they've taken to kidnapping young girls and performing surgeries on them, in the hopes of transplanting one of their faces onto Christiane. Over the course of the film they abduct three girls in this way- the first two transplants don't take, and by the time of the third, the police have begun to catch on to the trend of abductions. But ultimately Christiane lets the third girl go, kills Louise, and then lets loose a bunch of dogs which maul Dr. Génessier.

This film has a creepy atmosphere I suppose, but I'd be lying if I said 99% of the heavy lifting wasn't being done by the creepy featureless mask that Christiane wears throughout most of the film. The idea behind the story is more sad than creepy- a girl has a disfiguring injury and her father is so desperate to help her that he puts the lives of others at stake- but if she were just shown with a disfigured face, or if she wore like bandages or something over her face in all of her scenes, this would feel a lot less like a horror movie. (And for what it's worth, the director has said that he doesn't even consider it a horror story, but rather an anguish story.) I also don't really see what the point was of faking Christiane's death (I forgot to mention that, the movie starts with them purposely disposing of a faceless girl's body in the river so she'll be found and then Dr. Génessier can pretend that it was his daughter, so the world assumes she's dead)- not only does it just encourage the negative feelings towards Christiane's disability by saying she's better off thought of as dead than ugly, but her inability to remain distant from her lover is what gets the police on her father's trail.

Speaking of the police, the way their investigation goes is really weird. First off they only seem to notice a trend of abductions because all of the women being abducted seem to have the same color eyes (which doesn't make any sense, since they're not transplanting the eyes- so why did Louise only target women with blue eyes?) but once they've heard about the supposedly-dead Christiane making a phone call, they somehow then connect this to Dr. Génessier (through the ironclad piece of correlated evidence that is "a woman nearby was wearing a pearl necklace", that's a slam dunk, right?) but they don't actually investigate Dr. Génessier. Instead, they convince a girl to bleach her hair (for... some reason, there was no reason to think the victims had all been blonde) and then have her get admitted to Dr. Génessier's clinic, assuming that obviously he would arrange for her to be kidnapped after she's discharged. And the most shocking part is that's exactly what happens! No part of this makes sense to me.

Anyway, like I said, Christiane wears a mask for most of this film that's pretty offputting. The idea of being kidnapped and operated on (especially if it means someone is stealing your face) is pretty scary. There's a scene with some practical effects (where a woman gets her face surgically removed) that was very well-done given the quality of the visuals. But overall the movie just felt contrived, like someone had an idea and they were going to make the idea work no matter how much they had to twist and bend the narrative to make it work.

Overall Rating: 4/10 Featureless Masks

Alternative Title: Apparently this movie was first released in the US in an edited form, under the name "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus". (For the record, there is nobody in this film named Dr. Faustus.)