The Eyes of My Mother

Writer/director Nicolas Pesce makes an accomplished transition from music videos with this darkly disturbing slice of American Gothic that wears its debts to Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) with quiet pride. Divided into three chapters, the story charts how the murder of her Portuguese surgeon mother (Diana Agostini) impacts upon a young farm girl (played variously by the creepily angelic Olivia Bond and gracefully gruesome dancer Kika Magalhäes), whose outward innocence masks a chillingly logical cruelty. The lilting Amália Rodrigues fados on the soundtrack and the beauty of Zach Kuperstein's widescreen monochrome imagery belie the brutality of action that (thanks to Michael Kurihara's sound work) is definitely not for the squeamish. But, despite the hideous fates that befall homicidal salesman Will Brill, Japanese student Clara Wong and young mother Flora Diaz, this teasingly elliptical melodrama is more a psychological study of loneliness and the need for love than it is a generic shocker.