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Author: Daniel Goodwin

Opting to focus more on building a foreboding mood over an engaging narrative, debut film-maker Nicolas Pesce delivers an austere, redolent debut feature which slightly stirs and disturbs at times but, at a slender seventy six minutes, it is still often shockingly monotonous.

The story (broken down into chapters) focuses on a young girl called Francisca (Olivia Bond): a shy child who lives an isolated, tranquil existence on a remote Portuguese farm with her mother (Diana Agostini) and father (Paul Nazak). Until the day a tormented passer-by, posing as a salesman (Will Brill), enters their lives and adjusts the family dynamics. Teomm unravels with the air of an art-house torture porn b-movie/ graduate film, captured in mucky black and white for extra gothic gravitas, Pesce’s film fails to crack into its protagonist or excavate enough emotion to enrich the narrative. Pesce reduces his audience to the role of passive observers,...

If you haven't yet taken a trip to the farmhouse of frights (of both the physical and psychological variety) in Nicolas Pesce's The Eyes of My Mother, then prepare to mark your calendar, because Magnolia Home Entertainment has set an early March Blu-ray release date for the renowned 2016 film.

Blu-ray.com reports that The Eyes of My Mother will be released on Blu-ray (and fans expect a DVD release as well) on March 7th. Special features and cover art have yet to be revealed, but we'll keep Daily Dead readers updated on further details.

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...

Daily Deaders, we are hosting a contest where two of our readers can win a DVD copy of The Unspoken courtesy of Anchor Bay Entertainment. Continue reading for rules and entry details. Also in today's Highlights: three clips and a featurette for The Eyes of My Mother and details on the third annual Scary Christmas Party.

Contest: Win The Unspoken on DVD:

Prize Details: (2) Winners will receive (1) DVD copy of The Unspoken.

How to Enter: For a chance to win, email [email protected] with the subject “The Unspoken Contest”. Be sure to include your name and mailing address.

Entry Details: The contest will end at 12:01am Est on December 12th. This contest is only open to those who are eighteen years of age or older that live in the United States. Only one entry per household will be accepted.

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Press Release: "Beverly Hills, CA (October 31, 2016) – A sinister tale...

And now we’ve arrived at the end of the calendar year. As the final push for year-end viewing continues at a furious pace, some of the last unknown films of 2016 will finally make their way to audiences. To help focus your viewing choices, here is a list of films opening throughout the coming weeks, separated into categories of wide and limited runs. (Synopses are provided by festivals and distributors.)

If you’re interested in what still might be in a theater near you, check out our November Release Guide. For those curious what 2017 might bring, you can also visit our calendar page, which has releases through the beginning of the new year.

Happy watching!

Week of December 2 Wide

Incarnate

Director: Brad Peyton

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Carice van Houten, Catalina Sandino Moreno, David Mazouz, John Pirruccello, Keir O’Donnell, Matthew Nable

Synopsis: A scientist with the ability to enter the...

"You're just like your mother!" Depending on your age and circumstances, that can be either complementary or derogatory. For Francisca, it's the story of her life. Strikingly presented in black and white, The Eyes of My Mother (Os Olhos de Minha Mãe) follows Francisca from childhood to adulthood as she adapts to changing circumstances in her household. Told in quietly played, funereal tones, the style matches Francisca's personality. Raised on a farm, with no interaction with others, young Francisca (Olivia Bond) is taught to be self-sufficient by her parents. One day a stranger appears, and a common act of neighborly kindness by Francisca's mother (Diana Agostini) leads to tragedy. When Francisca's father (Paul Nazak) arrives home, he commits an act of violent retribution that affects...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Francisca's dance has an unsettling audience in one of three clips from Nicolas Pesce's The Eyes of My Mother, coming out on VOD and in theaters on December 2nd via Magnet Releasing.

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,...

The Eyes Of My Mother Magnet Releasing Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya Grade: B Director: Nicolas Pesce Written by: Nicolas Pesce Cast: Kika Magalhaes, Will Brill, Flora Diaz, Paul Nazak, Clara Wong Screened at: Critics’ DVD, NYC, 11/17/16 Opens: December 2, 2016 First-time writer-director Nicolas Pesce can look forward at age twenty-six to fairly original contributions to fans of horror who, at the same time, have the necessary patience to sit through a lyricism that makes a serial killer almost likable. While you may compare parts of the plot to events in the “Saw” series, primarily the frequent use of chains to keep a psycho’s prey in place in the [ Read More ]

The post The Eyes of My Mother Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

"You've done this before...? Why do you do it?" Magnolia Pictures has released a second trailer for the B&W indie horror drama The Eyes of My Mother, timed for release on Halloween because it's a twisted little tease that will haunt you well into the night. Diana Agostini plays "Mother" in this nasty horror about a mother who teaches her daughter to be "unfazed by death". The film has been described as a nightmare that is so unsettling and disturbing that many who've seen it want to forget it but can't. The Eyes of My Mother stars Kika Magalhães, Will Brill, Flora Diaz, Paul Nazak, Clara Wong, and Olivia Bond. There's only one scene in this new trailer but if you listen (and look) carefully, you will figure out what's happening. Here's the second official trailer for Nicolas Pesce's The Eyes of My Mother, from Magnolia's YouTube:...

Halloween is officially upon us, and though many of you – us included – will no doubt have indulged in some appropriately spooky celebrations over the course of the weekend, there’s still time to cram in some last-minute thrills and spills before the holiday is out.

Tapping into the darker elements of psychological horror, Magnolia Pictures has today peeled back the curtain on a deeply unsettling new trailer for The Eyes of My Mother, which sees a waking nightmare unfold in black and white. Helmed by first-time filmmaker Nicolas Pesce, the forthcoming horror pic centers on a disturbed young woman (newcomer Kika Magalhães) who keeps a murderer housed up in her basement.

Pesce’s thriller then explores the twisted, sometimes touching relationship that unfolds between the two, but it’s really the film’s striking art style that will surely send a shiver or three down the spine. Will Brill, Flora Diaz,...

Young Francisca has a creepy conversation with an unsettling stranger in the haunting new trailer for Nicolas Pesce's The Eyes of My Mother.

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,...

In honor of Halloween, Magnet Releasing offers a creeptastic new trailer for The Eyes Of My Mother, starring Kika Magalhães, Will Brill, Flora Diaz, Paul Nazak, Clara Wong, Diana Agostini, and Olivia Bond.

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,...

“I wanted to claw into the darkest recesses of your brain and poke at things that you don’t want to think about,” director Nicolas Pesce told us when it comes to his debut The Eyes of My Mother. Regardless of how one feels about the experience, there’s no denying his success in that aspect, as he captures a woman whose mother was killed, so she takes revenge in unnerving ways. Just in time for one’s Halloween celebration this evening, Magnolia Pictures has now released a new trailer. While the first preview was more of a proper trailer, this new teaser is more or a less a clip, showing off an early scene that sets up the unsettling scenario.

We said in our review, “On a personal level, I hated this picture with every fiber of my being. Rarely do I slip into the first-person for these reviews,...

Last week, IndieWire film critics Eric Kohn and David Ehrlich celebrated the Halloween season by naming the 13 best indie horror movies of 2016, and included among the lot of box office hits like “The Witch” and “Don’t Breathe” was Nicolas Pesce’s horrifying “The Eyes Of My Mother.” One of the major discoveries of the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, “Mother” is readying for release on December 2 with a new trailer that might just be the most unnerving preview of the year.

Read More: Sundance Review: ‘The Eyes of My Mother’ is the Discovery of This Year’s Festival

The story centers around a disturbed young woman (the revelatory Kika Magalhães) who, following a traumatizing encounter, keeps a murderer locked up in her barn and forges an unusual relationship with him. The new trailer is essentially one scene from the film, but its crisp black-and-white photography and terrifying character...

The trailer is now online for Magnet Releasing's The Eyes Of My Mother, starring Kika Magalhães, Will Brill, Flora Diaz, Paul Nazak, Clara Wong, Diana Agostini, and Olivia Bond.

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...

Gorgeous and grisly, the official trailer and poster for The Eyes of My Mother have been unveiled by Magnet Releasing ahead of the film's December release.

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,...

"I remember I was fascinated by how an inside of the body looked. She always hoped I would be a surgeon one day." Magnolia has released a trailer for the indie horror titled The Eyes of My Mother, which first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Diana Agostini plays "Mother" in this creepy horror thriller about a mother who teaches her daughter to be "unfazed by death" - who turns out to be rather freaky as a grown up. The film has been described as a nightmare that is so unsettling and disturbing that many who've seen it want to forget it but can't. It stays in your mind and will haunt you for days, weeks, even months after seeing it. The film stars Kika Magalhães, Will Brill, Flora Diaz, Paul Nazak, Clara Wong, and Olivia Bond. You can get a sense of the gruesomeness and bleakness of the film in this trailer.

One of the most divisive films at Sundance this year was Nicolas Pesce‘s The Eyes of My Mother, the latest production from Borderline Films, the team behind the uncompromising character studies Martha Marcy May Marlene, Simon Killer, James White, and more. The film follows a woman whose mother was killed, so she takes revenge in unnerving ways. Ahead of screenings at Fantastic Fest and a theatrical release this December, Magnolia Pictures have now released the first trailer.

We said in our review, “On a personal level, I hated this picture with every fiber of my being. Rarely do I slip into the first-person for these reviews, but for this I make an exception. Hopefully, I will forget the memory of seeing this movie and feeling the way I felt while watching it. In a way, this is a testament to its power and, in another way, a recommendation for...

Like an intoxicating fever dream, writer/director Nicolas Pesce’s The Eyes of My Mother is unlike any film I’ve seen in quite some time, akin to a nightmare you just can’t quite shake off. Breathtakingly shot in black and white, Pesce’s unsettling character study is as heartbreaking as it is depraved, making for an experience that will stay with you long after its gut-wrenching finale.

The Eyes of My Mother starts off innocently enough, introducing a young Francisca (Olivia Bond) as she picks flowers and roams the remote farm she shares with her mother (Diana Agostini) and father (Paul Nazak). There’s a gentleness to Francisca’s world, where she picks flowers and observes nature, but there’s also a bluntness to it as well, as her mother is a former veterinarian who teaches her daughter some of her methods (including decapitating a cow), making for...

The beautiful thing about horror is its ever-shifting form. A heavy-metal gorevalanch like Deathgasm defines one extreme of the genre (raucous over-the-top fun), while A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (black-and-white, emotional arthouse) spans the opposite side of a wide-reaching spectrum. Horror can seep into any situation, like how first-time filmmaker Nicolas Pesce corrupts a child’s youth in his ever-haunting debut, The Eyes Of My Mother. Black and white? Check. Ominously forbidding and deeply disturbing? Oh yeah. Horror by way of arthouse exploration? You betcha. Hey, who said genre films can’t get experimental every now and then?

Pesce’s film follows the maturation of Francisca, a sweet country girl whose life is stricken by tragedy. At a young age (played by Olivia Bond), Francisca’s mother (Diana Agostini) was murdered as she sat in the room next-door. Her father (Paul Nazak) arrived home too late for a rescue,...

Here is where I go off-book for my final Sundance review. The film is Nicolas Pesce‘s frightening The Eyes of My Mother, and I am not its target audience. This was not a pleasant experience for me. In fact, it took a lot to stay in the theater for the full 77-minute running time.

The plot concerns young Francisca (Olivia Bond), who watches her mother murdered at the hands of a psychopath and then becomes complicit with her father (Paul Nazak) in enacting a painful, tortuous amount of vengeance on the man responsible. Francisca, years later (Kika Magalhaes), has lost her father but still has the man, chained in the barn, and literally eating from the palm of her hand. Solitude serves as the fuel for Francisca’s own fractured psychosis, the film revealing itself to be an extended nightmare filmed in beautiful, disconcerting black-and-white by Zach Kuperstein. Magalhaes...

And Soon the Darkness: Pesce’s Debut a Superbly Stylized Nightmare

If Portugal were the portal to some Lynchian netherworld of dreams deferred, it would look something like Nicolas Pesce’s sumptuously grotesque directorial debut, The Eyes of My Mother. A striking palette of black and white cinematography from Zach Kuperstein recalls the scarred, destitute lives from the ruins of Arturo Ripstein’s filmography, a macabre yet uncharacteristically sound portrait of psychological unraveling. We all know the kind of potent degeneration to be fashioned on isolated farmhouses where dysfunctional children are paired with musings of surgical practices, as seen in films from Haneke or even last year’s Goodnight Mommy. Pesce, who previously directed multiple music videos, as well as assistant editor on Josh Mond’s James White (2015), debuts a spectacularly gruesome calling card which may deconstruct the notion of the physical lens through which living beings observe the world,...

The Sundance Film institute has released the line-up of film for the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Going to Sundance is one of my favorite events of the year. I love going because you never know what kind of movies you're going to see. Sometimes they are great films that amaze and entertain, other times they completely suck ass, but that's all part of the fun of going to the festival. It's an awesome experience for any hardcore movie geek, and if you ever get a chance to go, you need to.

The event takes place in Park City, Utah next year from January 21st to the 31st. It looks like there's a great line-up of movies at next year's event. My favorite portion of the event is the Midnight section because it deals more with geeky genre type movies, but I also enjoy the various sections of other line-ups.

Some of...

We might look back to 2015’s 10 film line-up as a true vintage year for the Next section. With the likes of Rick Alverson’s Entertainment, Sebastián Silva’s Nasty Baby, Matt Sobel’s Take Me to the River, Sean Baker’s Tangerine and section winner Josh Mond’s James White, we’d be hard pressed to say that this year’s 10 selected film selection is a better crop, but so far with names such as Tim Sutton and his super secretive third film (Dark Night – see pic above), video helmer we adore in Nicolas Pesce’s debut (The Eyes of My Mother), short film Yearbook fest winner Bernardo Britto’s first (Jacqueline Argentine), big Slamdance home run hitter with The Dirties’ Matt Johnson (Operation Avalanche) and the Venice to Park City bound The Fits from Anna Rose Holmer are all films we eagerly await. Here is the 10 section of what the fest calls “pure,...

Titles include Tallulah starring Ellen Page and Allison Janney, and Chad Hartigan’s Morris From America (pictured); Next strand also announced.Scroll down for full list

Sundance Institute has announced the 65 films selected for the Us Competition, World Competition and out-of-competition Next categories set to screen at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival (Jan 21-31) in Park City.

Us Dramatic Competition selections include Sian Heder’s Tallulah with Ellen Page and Allison Janney; Antonio Campos’ Christine; Clea DuVall’s feature directorial debut The Intervention; and Richard Tanne’s Southside With You, about Barack Obama’s first date with the First Lady.

Among the Us Documentary Competition selections are: Holy Hell by undisclosed; Jeff Feuerzeig’s Author: The Jt LeRoy Story; and Sara Jordenö’s Kiki.

The World Cinema Dramatic Competition entries include: Belgica (Belgium-France-Netherlands), Felix van Groeningen’s follow-up to The Broken Circle Breakdown; Manolo Cruz and Carlos del Castillo’s Between Sea And Land (Colombia); and Nicolette Krebitz’s Wild...