The bookends of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) consist of a wordless journey, given demented affection by Maurice Jarre’s score, to dispose of a female corpse dressed in men’s clothing and the escape of one animal after another, culminating in the brutal poetry of angry dogs attacking their captor and the film’s ultimate prisoner gliding ethereally into the night. To simply consider it as a horror film would almost break the spell of that first scene and lessen the potency of the last one. It is not a movie interested in scaring you with stunts. The emphasis seems to be on pulling the viewer in and then clutching him through a series of conflicting and engrossing turns only to finally allow some sort of catharsis but hardly any real understanding. We the audience can surely recognize why Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) wants to provide his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob) with a veneer of normalcy and why Louise (Alida Valli) feels indebted to him enough to aide in this project, but it’s much more difficult to grasp the lengths they go to in the pursuit of this goal.

More than once Franju commented on the superiority of taking a character who seems normal and having him act abnormally instead of starting off with someone who’s already abnormal and letting him follow that basic path of crazy behavior. Franju realized that the viewer will immediately separate himself from someone who’s clearly missing a few marbles while the more calm and apparently rational character is, in comparison, endearing and relatable enough as to make us curious and invested in his actions. This is Genessier in Eyes Without a Face, a man harboring guilt over the accident which took his daughter’s face but arrogant, even unstable, enough to bring in a collection of innocent young girls as specimens for experimentation. The conflict for the viewer is found in not being able to quite dismiss his actions completely considering the motivation is basically pure in that he only wants to give his daughter a new face. This can be empathized with to a point, though not in the realm of just how far Genessier goes.

But is that really the sole motivation for Genessier? After all, he is a doctor and a professor and someone interested in furthering the bounds of medical technology. The first time we see him is at a conference where he’s discussing how it would be necessary to completely drain the blood away from a human body for a certain procedure. He had previously rebuilt Louise’s face, presumably through a less complicated but similar method as the procedures attempted for Christiane. There’s a sense here that Genessier enjoys playing God through his experiments. At the very least, it’s clear that he’s not entirely considering Christiane’s best interests while trying to provide her with a new face. The life she’d had before is gone to the point where fresh skin can’t bring it back. She’s essentially dead already, reduced to either a hermetic existence at her father’s villa outside Paris or a new life entirely. Another girl’s face would let her at least merge into society but the alternative, either that creepy, doll-like mask or the deformities she’s left with after the accident, resigns Christiane to freak status. The impact of the ending is heightened considerably by this arc we witness from her.

Franju fit in Edith Scob to play Christiane with a very similar purpose as he’d give her a few years later in Judex, where Scob, a favorite of the director’s who starred in a handful of his pictures, is again a fragile innocent effectively victimized by a fringe-dwelling madman who exhibits great affection for her character. In Eyes Without a Face, she takes on such a porcelain quality of delicacy and innocence. The scene near the end when she gracefully moves along freeing one caged dog after another positions her as a sort of horror angel untouched by the surrounding terror. It’s a remarkably touching scene, photographed, like the entirety of the film, with style and precision by Eugen Shuftan. The cinematographer captures a very specific mood throughout, whether it’s in a shot of Louise cloaked in darkness while at the wheel or in the unease we get from an out of focus peek at Christiane’s unmasked face. Shuftan was one of the true masters of light and shadows beyond noir in black and white films. His work here almost speaks for itself.

From an attribute virtually beyond reasonable debate in Shuftan’s contribution to a character whose motivations and ambiguity are, for me, the most endlessly interesting aspect of the film. Alida Valli’s Louise - nurse, grateful patient, accomplice, loyal disposer of dead bodies, and cruiser for future victims - is simply a fascinating character. Her actions more often disgust than comfort yet she’s sort of positioned as a moral compass, at least in comparison to Genessier. She too seems greatly bothered by the things she does and the lengths Genessier expects her to go to, but it’s never enough to stop Louise from again abetting the doctor. The loyalty she owes Genessier is just too much to refuse his requests. In some ways, she’s actually a more reprehensible figure than he is because she doesn’t seem to share his determination yet she still goes along with it all. Genessier’s reasons are highly flawed, even deranged, and he gives no mind to the grotesqueness of these sacrifices, but Louise rationally appreciates each of the little disasters without getting out of the game. This doesn’t seem lost on Franju either, as he gives Genessier a very messy demise which nonetheless strikes the viewer from a visceral standpoint while Louise’s fate is far more cold and abrupt.