Sometimes a film is so enshrined in a canon, taken for granted as representative of either a genre (or subgenre), a national cinema, a director or actor's career, that it risks being a film talked about, but perhaps not watched, or not remembered as it should be, in its entirety, for all it offers beyond its cult status. Or perhaps, if it's one that's sat on your proverbial shelf for a while and you want to introduce it to a friend, maybe you might have a second of hesitation and wonder, will it live up to the hype I've given it?
Luckily, we don't need to worry about that with Eyes Without a Face. A long favourite among horror film fans, it also stands the test of time as a psychological drama (arguably you could take out some of the horror aspects and you would still have a serious and disturbing story). Over time, director Georges Franju would call it his favourite of his own films. A tale of guilt, power, despair, and anger, its steady pace and economy of gore make it both an uncanny and all too plausible horror. Criterion has updated their release with a 4K restoration of the iconic film.
A woman (we later learn she is Louise, played by Italian actress Alida Valli) is driving through the country road night, with a person in a trench coat seemingly sleeping in the backseat. But as this woman makes a turn to a lake and takes the body out of the car, it's clear that it is a body, a dead one). The next scene moves to a public lecture by renowned surgeon Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), discussing skin grafting techniques. We learn that his wife has died fairly recently, and his daughter is missing. Cut to him being called to the morgue to identify a body - the body from the first scene, which he will claim is his daughter's. Not only was she naked under the trench coat, but the skin of her face was missing. A gruesome and inexplicable death.
But it doesn't take long for more pieces of this puzzle to be introduced, and soon enough, we learn that his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) is alive, but her face burned from a car accident caused by Génessier. Racked with guilt, he has begin kidnapping beautiful young women with the hope of transplanting their face onto his daughter's, so she can be free in the world again.
It's a story both outrageous and sinisterly plausible. It's also a film that plays with expectations of trope, theme, and finale. Given the premise, it might be a filed under the 'mad scientist' horror subgenre. And yes, Génessier is not mad; at least, he's not insane. It was never a goal in his life to rfemake his daughter's face, but comes entirely from terrible circumstance. And the fact of his calm demeanor, his logical reasoning, his willingness to sacrifice innocent women in pursuit of his goals, make him a man who becomes evil. Well, we do find out that he has done this before, successfully, so perhaps he is not entirely sane. But a sane man engaging in horrifying acts, is more terrifying than an insane one.
Franju said in interviews that he didn't see himself as necessarily making a horror film, which can explain the very steady pace, the lack of the usual horror movie music cues, his villain being a man racked with guilt yet still driven by personal pride and hubris. The calmness that Génessier displays for most of the film, is contrasted by the women in his life: Louise, his assistant, and Christiane. Both the women, while not extreme in their emotional displays, emphasize the emotional turmoil simply by exposing themselves to their emotional states more frequently. Louise clearly has a love that goes beyond mere gratitude for the man that made her beautiful, while Christiane must contend with her disfigurement and wishing she had died, her isolation on her father's estate, and knowledge of what he is doing to save her.
While Génessier's motivations are clear and chilling, Christiane is enigmatic, appropriately for a young woman who now (somewhat unwillingly) must hide behind a mask. That mask, perfectly pristine, white and smooth, hides what to Christiane, her father, and they assume the world, is a face disfigured enough as to overshadow anything else about her. Christiane wanders the large family home as a ghost in her shapeless large gown, leaving only her eyes and her hands for expression. She is guilty in her fascination with the kidnapped women whose faces she will wear; she communes with the dogs that her father uses for his experiments, like her as lonely souls trapped. She makes secret phone calls to her fiancé, who believes her to be dead. She wants to be more than just her face.
There are so many layers to Eyes Without a Face: not only how Génessier turns his surgical interests into a way to 'save' his daughter, but that he feels the need to hide what happened to her from the world, as if her etherial beauty were all that mattered. But it's hard to think of a time when, despite all we say today about physical appearance being irrelevant to a person's worth, such a gruesome disfigurement would not make someone want to hide themselves away in fear and shame. Franju presents this story with such a stead tone, a slow build of tension and events that we know will lead to someone's destruction, but like Christiane as she observes her father work, we cannot look away.
A film of strange beauty, of horror and suspense, Eyes Without a Face continues to prove why it is not only a classic of horror cinema, but of French cinema. While still a psychological drama, this story of a family torn apart by grief and guilt, a man driven by pride, a woman trying to move past her shame, it's a story of deep sadness and grief, ending with a spectacular and perhaps inevitable final tragedy to set the heroine free.
Special Features
This reissue of the Criterion edition features a new 4K restoration, created from the original 35 mm camera negative, giving it the best possible quality. As Edith Scob notes in her interview on the extras, the mask made for her of Christiane's disfigured face was not great, and so Franju insisted the few shots that showed it, were not in focus. The restoration keeps these semi-blurry image that only makes its horror more stark. The monaural soundtracks was also captured from the original negative, and both the new 4K and the blu-ray look and sound fantastic.
There are three interviews/profiles: one with Edith Scob from 2013, which gives her memories and insights into how she undertook and understood her character, and the experience of working with Franju. From what looks like a delightful television program "Le Fantastique', a man in costume interviews Franju about genre film. Franju admits to not liking the word 'fantastique' as a descriptive, how he worked around the censors to make Eyes Without a Face marketable (for example, using black and white to minimize the gore), and how his aim in cinema is to make them feels like dreams (or nightmares). There is also an excerpt from a documentary, featuring interviews with crime novelists and co-screenwriters Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who discuss ttheir process for writing crime and thriller stories.
A great companion film to the Eyes Without a Face, Franju's documentary short Blood of the Beasts is included. A sobering look at the abattoirs of Paris, which existed on the city outskirts, usually in the poorer neighbourhoods. Franju firsts sets a somewhat romantic stage, with a serene woman's voice discussing both the tragedy and the beauty of this rundown neighbourhoods, then moves to a rather sober man's voice describing how an animal is prepared as meat, over images of these acts. Given the time period and disregard for a lot of health and hygiene regulations, it's likely to still be as shocking today as it was when it was made.
Two essays give complementary accounts of the film. The first, by author and editor Patrick McGrath, gives an overview of the film, its themes and imagery, and why it has remained a classic (and a cult classic) for decades. The second, by film historian David Kalat, tells the film's production history, the film's rather scandalous first screening, and its place in French film history.
Eyes without a Face will be released on October 14th, 2025.