This movie turns horror into idyllic poetry

Frances 2022-04-05 09:01:07

This movie turns horror into an idyllic poem

The level of horror films is divided into three levels: fright, thriller and horror .

Most of the horror movies we know are known from the first two.

Through the sudden appearance of ghosts and eerie dubbing, it is enough to shoot the atmosphere that mainstream horror films need to render.

Therefore, in the eyes of most audiences, " horror " and " art " seem to never be related.

However, today's film has deconstructed and reconstructed horror through emotion and art, and made it into an art film with a strong personal style——

mother's eyes

No one can imagine how a horror movie can be full of artistic atmosphere,

Carrying a killing knife and reciting ancient poetry?

If you think so, you are far underestimating the ability of director Nicolas Pechet .

Let me tell you a fact that is enough to surprise you: this director is born in the 90s .

The post-90s mean that he does not have many works, and also means that he is not familiar with the world and has no directing experience. But when you watch the whole film, you will feel that his grasp of people's emotions and the mobilization of emotions can be described as "young and mature".

A "Mother's Eyes" is enough to kill 90% of domestic horror movies.

The film adopts a three-stage narrative method. The three stories are connected to each other. The family is the background, the emotions are the clues, and the inheritance of the mental state is the convergence point of the whole film.

Before the beginning of each video, there will be such a hint under the shady screen——

The three-part story structure can be said to be the secret of Hollywood dramas galloping in the world film market for so many years, but not every film is as straightforward as "Mother's Eyes".

The three-stage structure was first derived from "Basics of Movie Script Writing" by Sid Field, a famous Hollywood screenwriting coach . It is divided into:

1. Act 1: Building (plot point 1) 2. Act 2: Confrontation (plot point 2) 3. Act 3: Ending

Field himself, who died in 2013 at the age of 77

Likewise, the three-part form is a step into a deep nightmare.

There is a reason for Pecher's almost straightforward approach to art, from the simplest of film structures.

The artistry of this horror film is not just mere formality.

In terms of composition and photography , you'll find it's not an exaggeration to call "Mother's Eyes" idyllic.

Black and white photography , similar to the domestic literary film "August", is retro and nostalgic.

Domestic film "August"

But in this film, it's more of a moderation between art and horror, an artistic expression of the middle ground in the film style.

At the beginning of the film, it freezes on a highway, a truck drives slowly, and a weak woman gradually falls down in front of her.

But when the lens is upgraded, you will see a standard photographic work in sight-

Yes, that's right, this is a very standard " parallel line composition" image, and the people and images that need to be highlighted are concentrated in the middle of the parallel lines.

When the heroine vented her emotions in the cedar forest, another photographic work popped up.

Then again in the same way, when the heroine slowly walked out of the cedar forest, the car slowly approached on the road, appeared and disappeared from the eyes of the audience.

The same composition method, but upgraded to a perspective.

In terms of the use of the lens, the post-90s director Pei Xie also showed amazing skills.

The heroine killed her father, but felt lonely because of the loss of a close relative. When she was taking a bath with her father's body, a long mirror was above the character, watching the crying Francis slowly paddling into the milk tub.

Because of the performance of photography, what the audience felt at this time was not the terrifying atmosphere and the unique discomfort of horror films, but the depression and loneliness through the screen.

There is also a scene where a textbook-like distortion of characters is delivered. When Francis watched her "boyfriend" flee in the middle of the night, she first walked over calmly with a knife—

Then the two embraced, and the camera instantly cut to a close-up. The knife and blood did not appear, but the background sound of stabbing a knife was used.

One knife, two knives...

Foreign media commented on this paragraph-

No need for blood red visuals to make one feel shivering or nervous, the black and white world is distorted enough

To say that the artistry of the film is limited to these forms would be an overstatement to call it "idyllic".

Pechet does a fantastic job of deconstructing the atmosphere of terror and violence.

He cleverly kept most of the violence out of the picture, and we can only feel the deepest horror through the consequences of violence through the film's dubbing and deliberately cut-out pictures.

When a strange man pointed a gun at his mother and entered the bathroom, the camera cut to the father who was driving. The door of the bathroom was just opened, and the background sound flashed some dismemberment sounds, and the picture suddenly turned to the murderer who was subdued by his father——

The murderer is imprisoned in the barn, and there is a peaceful conversation between Francis and him,

-Why did you do this (killing)

- that feels great

The subsequent shots were given to Francis who turned and left, but behind him slowly sat up a "male favorite" who had no eyes and couldn't speak.

The first friend, an Asian girl who met an Asian girl in a bar, when she fled to the door in a hurry, the camera went directly to Francis again, slowly wiping the blood on the ground——

Including the most shocking and depressing passages of the entire film, it is also handled in the same way.

Francis came out of the cedar forest and came across a car with a mother and son in it. Francis tricked the baby into his hands, imprisoned his mother in the same way, and formed a family with the child himself.

In the previous shot, Francis was stitching something, and the stitching stopped suddenly. As the lying figure got up, a mother without eyes and unable to speak suddenly appeared, and there was her own child crying beside her.

(The following pictures may cause discomfort)

Playing horror, the most advanced is playing psychology.

Peixe abandoned the usual atmosphere-building methods that people used to scare the audience with sudden ghost images or cause associations with no interaction.

Instead, the horrific consequences of violent acts are shown directly, omitting assassinations and blood plasma.

This kind of intentional blank space in the narrative undoubtedly evokes the audience's infinite reverie more than the splash of blood on the screen.

Coupled with black-and-white pictures and gloomy soundtrack, the feeling of chest tightness and suffocation when the audience sees the mother who has lost her eyes is irreplaceable for all horror films.

These are not the most brilliant of Pixie.

The most brilliant thing about "Mother's Eyes" is to return the ultimate cause of terror to the most common human emotions.

lonely .

At the beginning of the film, the mother who had not had a lunch box said a word to little Francis, which established the emotional tone of the whole film——

Loneliness does strange things to the mind

This is actually a precaution given by the director to the audience.

All human emotions are related. When a certain negative emotion develops to the extreme, other emotions and even the human spirit will change.

Aside from the objective factors of family education, it can be said that what made Francis change is the atrocities of the mother-killer and the hatred of losing his mother; and what makes Francis completely degenerate is the innate sense of loneliness.

When the murderer of his mother was subdued, he asked little Francis—

You're going to kill me, right?

The result was that the answer was-

Why should I kill you, you are my only friend

How can I break through the loneliness of the sky and treat my mother's murderer as a friend?

As Francis grew up, all his actions seemed to be motivated by a sense of loneliness that he could not resolve.

He killed the "male pet" ruthlessly because of his sudden escape in the middle of the night,

The new friend she met in the nightclub was killed because she abandoned her after learning that the heroine killed her father.

For a long time, Francis lived alone on the farm with his mother, the only contact with anatomy after that. After the murder, her anatomical dazzling skills, like a broom, were finally attributed to her longing for her mother.

When the story is about to end, the passers-by around the heroine are killed one by one, and the heroine with a burst of loneliness comes to the place where her mother is buried and digs her grave to hug her.

It directly echoes the previous bathing with his father's body, and embeds these two most shocking and poetic scenes into the core of the film.

Hateful people must be pitiful. This girl who went crazy in loneliness, while bringing a sense of blood coagulation, is not worthy of pity at all.

In the final chapter, Francis raises the kidnapped child, living alone on a farm with a mother and a child, just like when he was a child.

If the director tried a little harder to cut off the end of the story here, all the audience would think—

Could this child, like Francis as a child, fall into a pathological state of violence and his own emotional imbalance?

But it didn't end like this. With the escape of the imprisoned mother, the intrusion of the police, and the sound of a gunshot,

The curtain falls.

Pei Xie magnified the loneliness of ordinary people tenfold, to tell a tragic horror story,

In the final analysis, it is a reflection on human nature and a discussion on the family, supplemented by excellent artistic composition and photography, ingenious lens language,

This horror film like a literary film,

It ripped apart reality for us and presented the deepest nightmare of human nature.

I respect repressed musings more than empty threats.

Welcome to pay attention to the public account that wasted dinner after watching the movie: Time Movie Shop (sgtjmovie)

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Extended Reading
  • Jennings 2022-04-07 09:01:06

    The black and white images are stunningly beautiful. Peeling off the outer layer of the bloody story is the story of the growth of a girl alienated in loneliness, cruel to others, to herself, to the audience. It is a pity that the director has weak control over the accumulation of contradictions and the arrangement of violent elements, and the gimmicks are sufficient. The girl's personality as the protagonist of a horror film is always like the voice tube of the victims who have been cut open.

  • Elda 2022-04-07 09:01:06

    fine. Similar to Bergman [more precisely Haneke? Like "White Ribbon"] Take Takashi Miike

The Eyes of My Mother quotes

  • Francisca: Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. And whether or not it is clear to you, the universe is unfolding as it should.

  • Francisca: Everything I do is for you.

    Francisca: I just want us to be together.

    Francisca: I would do anything to be with you.