On the fifteenth night of Halloween ... I watched The Eyes of My Mother (2016), written and directed by Nicolas Pesce.
This film opens with a trucker playing a cassette recording of the 1930 murder ballad, "The Murder of the Lawson Family," which tells of the gruesome 1929 familicide of the Lawsons, a clan of North Carolina sharecroppers. And the film closes with Amália Rodrigues' 1970 recording of the soulful Portuguese ballad of love lost, "Com Que Voz," which the main character is earlier seen playing on a gramophone while dancing with her father's taxidermized corpse. These two songs underscore what Pesce wants to create: a rural gothic folk tale of a family's grisly deeds, hidden away on a farm that seems isolated in both space and time-- a folk tale that is in turn embedded in the haunting exploration of one woman's loneliness after her parents' deaths and the circumstances of her upbringing have left her with a twisted, almost inhuman, mind. Pesce largely succeeds in this aim through the stark beauty of his black and white compositions and through Kika Magalhães' empathetic performance as the deeply confused Francisca.
Perhaps I was expecting something a bit more otherworldly, something leaning more into folk horror, and not quite as narratively frank-- but in any case this is definitely a strong, memorable work.
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