trublu215 Review of The Eyes of My Mother

The Eyes of My Mother (2016)

A Prententious and Painfully Slow Horror Film

[3/10 · 19 April 2017]

The Eyes of My Mother tells the story of a young girl as she is subjected to a horrific and violent event that leads to her mother being killed at her family's remote farmhouse. As the father comes home, he knocks out her killer and decides to hold him hostage in a barn. Sounds good, right? Wrong! The Eyes of My Mother is one of the most pretentious and idiotic attempts at creating an atmospheric film that I've ever seen. Filmed in the stark beauty of black and white, the film never exceeds more than 60 shots and each shot lingers for far too long in hopes of creating tension. It doesn't. Instead, the film tries to make the most out of its paper thin plot by stretching out everything. The dialog is stretched, the shots are stretched, everything feels stretched so thin that it is hard to even determine whether the film had enough in its tank to fill the short runtime. At 76 minutes, this film should have been snappy and very intriguing. It ends up feeling like 176 minutes. It's painfully slow and boring and it is clear that director Nicolas Pesce was determined to make a feature length film on a subject that a short film could have handsomely supported. Overall, The Eyes of My Mother is one of the slowest and emptiest films I've ever seen. Despite its look and decent acting, the film suffers from a poor script and terrible pacing.