[7.1/10] The cool thing about foreign films is that they give you a glimpse into another culture and a different way of looking at familiar ideas. The cool thing about classic films is that they communicate different values and social anxieties that we may feel differently about today. So films which are both foreign and classics can feel like stepping into another world altogether.

In practical terms, that comes through in the way that *Eyes Without a Face* is not just a very deliberately paced film, but also one that shows its characters doing the little things. Modern editing would cut away from a character dialing every number and wouldn't show every step of the villain’s drive home. But this movie spends time on those moments. In places, that can become tedious, but it’s also intriguing as a technique that forces the viewer to live in that world a little bit more, face the mundane aspects of the characters’ day-to-day without sacrificing the less exciting bits.

That approach pays off in a big way in the film’s showpiece sequence, where Dr. Genessier and his assistant, Louise, surgically remove the face of one of their unfortunate victims. It’s the most stomach-churning and horror-filled interlude in the entire film, as director Georges Franju forces the audience to confront the entire procedure with minimal discretion shots. Watching the surgery proceed from mere markings, to slices through the perimeter of the poor woman’s face, to then gradually tugging it off makes your skin crawl.

But the movie avoids the sense of gratuitous by making it part and parcel with other tactile and unhurried scenes in the film. That doesn’t ease the visceral discomfort of seeing the procedure performed, but it makes it feel of a piece with the rest of the movie rather than something cheap for the mere sake of being gut-wrenching.

It also reveals the values of the film. In an age where organ transplants are common, the miracle they represent has almost become unremarkable. But in 1960, at a time where the practice was still far from typical and not standardized the way it is now, it makes sense as a source of terror and the macabre. The film implicitly critiques Dr. Genessier for playing god, for wanting to control things, for meddling with nature in a way that is not only wrong, but which calls for karmic comeuppance.

Now hey, maybe some of that is the fact that, you know, he isn’t just transplanting kidneys from willing donors into sick patients. He is, instead, conspiring to kidnap, disfigure, and when things go wrong, secretly dispose of innocent young women. He goes to such lengths in order to give his daughter, Christiane, a face again, after she lost hers in a car accident that she blames on her father. It adds a dark twist to the tale, one that deepens Dr. Genessier’s sins in some ways, as he seems as interested in furnishing his own genius as he does rectifying his former mistakes. But it also makes this story a personal one.

That lends itself to the utter spookiness of the proceedings. Beyond the grim acts of Dr. Genessier and Lousie stalking, luring, and brutalizing the poor souls who happen to have a face that could match Christiane’s, the film adds an unsettling atmosphere using Christiane herself. There’s an uncanny valley effect to the pale white mask she wears, particularly as she seems to haunt her own home, almost floating about, softly looming over the unsettling manor with an expressionless covering.

In truth, some of those moments drag. To be frank, at times *Eyes Without a Face* feels like a good forty-five minute story stretched out to an hour and a half. But the good material within is worth sitting through long scenes of characters driving or putting up with the goofy score that kicks in whenever Louise is up to something malevolent or dealing with keystone cops who put a woman in mortal danger as part of a cockamamie ploy simply because she fits the killers’ profile for their targets.

There’s interesting notions about feeling captive and controlled, to the point where you’ll do anything to escape. For all its focus on the hubris of Dr. Genessier, *Eyes Without a Face* spends as much on time on the pathos of Christiane. It’s poignant when she phones her fiance but can’t say a word lest she reveal that she’s not really dead. It’s sad when she ask Louise to kill her rather than subject her to more captivity or make her an accessory to another murder supposedly for her benefit. It’s triumphant when she stops the treadmill of death and failed surgeries that she’s been caught in since the accident and manages to escape. Christiane is the heart of the picture, and the thing that saves it from being a mere “bad man does bad things until the universe punishes him for it” story.

And yet, the most tension and poetry in the film comes in its final sequence, where Christiane makes her escape and Dr. Genessier receives his comeuppance. There’s suspense when Christianne raises her scalpel as though to harm the latest would-be victim, and instead frees her from the restraint. There’s a sense of both justice and tragedy when she plunges that scalpel into the heart of Louise, who aided in the mad doctor’s callous schemes but out of a sense of gratitude for rectifying her own deformity.

There’s a sense of karmic poetry to Christiane freeing the animals whom her father caged and performed his experiments on, a last kindness among many she’d shown the kindred spirits, only for them to brutalize and disfigure him much as he did to others. And there’s beauty (albeit not much subtlety) in Christiane leaving her prison in the presence of uncaged birds, stealing off into the night like some ghostly Disney princess. These scenes nearly justify the rest of the movie on their own.

But so does the opportunity to see notions of parenthood, captivity, and medical science processed through the lens of a culture across an ocean and sixty years removed in time. Not every piece of it translates, informed by different societal expectations and cinematic grammar. Still, the experience is a worthwhile one to discover those parts of expression that feel universal, both of horror and of liberation, of prideful sins and woeful innocence, when our masks fall.