Les yeux sans visage
Eyes Without a Face begins at night as a young woman eases her car down a back road near a river. She stops and manages to pull out of the car a woman's body wrapped in an overcoat and dumps it into the river. We are then introduced to a medical professor giving a lecture before a rapt group of admirers. The woman is Louise (Alida Valli) and her employer Prof. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) has been attempting to perfect a number of surgical procedures, one of which it turns out is grafting skin from one animal to another. He experiments with dogs and has many mongrels penned up on his estate that he uses as subjects. When detectives bring the professor to identify the dead woman that Louise has dropped into the river, he says that it is the body of his missing daughter Christiane (Edith Scob). Meanwhile Louise drives around the French city looking for young women to spark up a friendship with. At the secluded estate of the professor his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) remains hidden from view, and it turns out her face is covered with a mask to hide her features that have been damaged in a car accident caused by the father. The professor had previously performed plastic surgery on Louise that was successful with only a minor little scar at the base of her neck, a scar that Louise hides with a string of pearls. With Christiane, however the plastic surgery graft has not been successful and so the professor and Louise kidnap young women to attempt to transpose their beauty onto young Christiane. Things begin to go wrong when Christiane reaches out to an ex beau and the insular world of this dysfunctional family collapses.
gothic, murder, violence, horror, atmospheric, claustrophobic, romantic