Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux Sans Visage) [1960]

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Editorial reviews

Synopsis
A surgeon feels responsible when his beautiful daughter is disfigured in a car crash. He tries to restore her features by kidnapping runaway girls, peeling off their faces and grafting them onto his daughter's. French dialogue with subtitles.

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2007-07-27 rating:
A sad and slightly sympathetic horror movie
In this case the mad scientist is a sympathetic mad scientist. He was the one who caused the accident that destroyed his daughter's face (terrible burns, immersion in water and, of course, the rats). But Christiane Genessier (Edith Scob) survived, and her father, Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur), with the assistance of his devoted nurse, Louise (Alida Valli), is determined to construct a new face for her. To do this, he surgically removes the faces of young women and grafts them onto the destroyed face of his daughter, all the while trying to find a solution to the problem of tissue rejection.

Eyes Without a Face, in my opinion, is not as good as the hype might have you believe, but it is nonetheless an unsettling, eery, well-made movie. One of the things that makes it so unsettling is that nothing really gruesome is shown, just implied, until the one scene where a face is carefuly, surgically removed. You might not feel like ordering steak tartare after watching Doctor Genessier's technical skills.

The movie is almost leisurely as it establishes the story line and developes the characters, but it never seems slow. Genessier initially seems disturbed, emotionally dead. He's a stolid man who moves carefully and always is in control. But as we learn that his wife died, that he has a clinic where he helps patients, that he has feelings of some sort for Louise, and that he clearly loves his daughter, well, a kind of sympathy creeps in.

Christiane, nearly always wearing a white mask that could almost be mistaken for her face, drifts, almost floats, through the movie. And slowly she becomes more deranged in a quiet, moving way. She is the cause, finally, of the resolution of the movie. Her fate is sad and ambiguous.

This is not a horror movie from the local pizza school of film making -- doughy with dripping red sauce and stinking of cheap cheese. Is it a great movie? No. Is it a good movie? Yes. And you can call it a horror movie if you want to.

The Criterion DVD transfer is very good, especially considering the age of the film. There are a number of extras that I didn't watch.

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review by: Saskia666 date: 2006-10-17 rating:
Le Grand Guignol on the silver screen
I came across this film when I found out that the script was written by the two same french guys that wrote Diaboliques and Vertigo.

Eyes Without A Face is not only a plastic surgery shocker in the tradition of Paris's fabled Grand Guignol, but it is also a very touching film, with pathos and tragedy running throughout. The scenes where the woman without a face hidden away, calls the one she loves without saying a word just to hear his voice, is moving beyond words.

Horror film-makers today should be forced to see this film. This is how you do it. Watch and learn.

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review by: date: 2005-02-05 rating:
Frankly unforgettable
The French always liked to camouflage their guilty pleasures as intellectual aspirations, and the genre movie, be it the thriller, the drama or the horror flic made in France have adorned themselves with metaphysical deliberations.

Director Georges Franju, who in the 1930s established the Cinémateque Francais with the likes of Jack Lang, is not a pretentious Frenchman, far from it. He loved the bizarre and the grotesque, and if you share his taste for the poetically unfathomable, the suggestive, you will love this new CD from Criterion. 'Eyes Without a Face' is about a surgeon whose daughter was the victim of a car accident that peeled away the skin from her face. His nurse and mistress now picks up pretty young girls with whose skin the surgeon can experiment. His aim is to perfect a skin transplant to help his daughter. When the police gets a whiff of this they pick a young girl as a decoy and ... Well, you will have to see for yourself.

The movie starts out as a somewhat shabby, but highly effective noir with Alida Valli driving her car nervously along the highway, trying to get rid of yet another corpse of a young woman. Gradually the film evolves into the silent horrors of the middle part (the only other two films I know that are equally silent are Bergman's 'The Silence' and Hitchcock's 'Notorious') and the climax of which I shall reveal absolutely nothing, but it is frankly unforgettable.

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review by: www.sjhstrangetales.com date: 2003-10-22 rating:
French gothic masterpiece.
Another reviewer on these pages wrote that once you've seen "Eyes Without A Face" you will want to put it in your top 10 of best horror films, and I can only strongly second that. In it a young woman, chronically disfigured in a road accident, lives a twilight existence in her father's country house. Unbeknown to her, her doctor father, with the help of his sinister female assistant, is abducting young women and surgically removing their faces in a desperate bid to carry out a successful skin graft, in order that his daughter can have a face again. The experiments inevitably go wrong and the victims are slain and dumped.

The whole film has a strong Grimms fairy tale feel to it. The scenes set in and around the doctor's house are incredibly atmospheric, with the constant sound of birdsong in the background, and Christiane, in her mask, drifting gracefully through the building like the captive princess in the tower. The face-transplant scene isn't for the faint-hearted, but the most disturbing scene of all is when one of the victims wakes up on the operating-table and catches a glimpse of Christiane without her mask. The portrayel of the doctor is also very good. You sympathise with his obsession to make his daughter's life right again, but are also aware that it has turned him into a monster, willing to sacrifice any number of innocent girls to achieve this aim. Doe-eyed Edith Scob is also perfectly cast as the tragic Christiane.


review by: date: 2002-11-03 rating:
A mad doctor tries to repair his daughter's ruined face
"Eyes Without a Face" ("Les Yeux sans visage") is a horror film in which there is certain sympathy with the mad doctor, in this case Doctor Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) who is trying to repair the horrible damage to his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) in a car accident that was his fault. The doctor, helped by his assistant Louise (Alida Valli), has been kidnapping young girls so that he can remove their skin and graft it onto Christiane's ruined face. Not only do the victims die, but the grafts fail, forcing Genessier to try again and again and again. What makes Georges Franju's film work is the inherent sympathy we feel towards the father trying to make his daughter beautiful again, just as we are repulsed by the surgical procedures he uses. Meanwhile, Genessier remains oblivious to what his efforts are doing to Christiane's own tenuous hold on reality.

"Eyes Without a Face" moves back and forth from the sacred and the profane, between the love of a parent for a child and meaningless destruction of human life. Franju conveys this contrast visually through the use of poetic images and realistic scenes. I have read arguments that "Eyes Without a Face" should be considered with "Psycho" as creating the splatter flick, and while it is hard to imagine anything having the impact of Hitchcock's film, Franju's movie is more artistic overall (of course, the shower scene is the master trump when we talk about horror films as "art"). This black & white French film with English subtitles is well worth seeing and could end up on your personal top 10 horror film list.

The "Eyes Without a Face" translation is the British title for this 1959 release, which was called "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus" when released in the United States in 1962, in what must be one of the stupidest titles grafted onto a foreign film in cinema history. Here you have a film that walks a fine line between beautiful visual images, such as when Christiane walks through the house in her mask, and viseral horror, represented by not just the operation scenes but the film's climax. The title is simple and elegant, not to mention appropriate to the story being told, and some suit who heard about Christopher Marlowe while reading an E.C. comic comes up with "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus." Mon dieu, mon ami!

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