This 'The Eyes Of My Mother' Trailer Makes Me Wish I Liked The Movie More

I really wanted to like The Eyes of My Mother. It had great reviews, was supposedly a brutal, terrifying slow burn, and all around sounded like my jam. While it is all of those things, it just didn’t do it for me. (You can read my REVIEW if you’re so inclined.) But that’s not going to stop it from opening, and a new trailer is here to creep you out.

While thematically and tonally appropriate to appear on Halloween, this The Eyes of My Mother trailer just makes me wish I liked the movie more.

First time feature director Nicolas Pesce’s black and white footage is gorgeous, and the aesthetic is its greatest strength. My problem is that it’s all style over substance, and while that’s not necessarily a deal breaker, this left me cold. The shocks are totally manufactured, and everything built around them rings empty and hollow. I compared it to Eli Roth attempting to make a David Lynch movie and failing. It feels like bros trying way to hard to come up with the most fucked up thing they can think of and ignoring every other element to the narrative’s detriment.

But that’s just me, and what the hell do I know? Other people seem to dig The Eyes of Your Mother. Maybe you will too. This trailer is creepy and eerie and the little girl at the center of the action is certainly all kinds of fucked up.

Here’s a synopsis:

In their secluded farmhouse, a mother, formerly a surgeon in Portugal, teaches her daughter, Francisca, to understand anatomy and be unfazed by death. One afternoon, a mysterious visitor shatters the idyll of Francisca’s family life, deeply traumatizing the young girl, but also awakening unique curiosities. Though she clings to her increasingly reticent father, Francisca’s loneliness and scarred nature converge years later when her longing to connect with the world around her takes on a dark form. Shot in crisp black and white, the haunting visual compositions evoke its protagonist’s isolation and illuminate her deeply unbalanced worldview. Genre-inflected, but so strikingly unique as to defy categorization, writer/director Nicolas Pesce’s feature debut allows only an elliptical presence in Francisca’s world, guiding our imaginations to follow her into peculiar, secret places.

Starring Kika Magalhães, Will Brill, Flora Diaz, Paul Nazak, Clara Wong, Diana Agostini, and Olivia Bond, The Eyes of My Mother opens in theaters and hits VOD on December 2.