Cast:
Pierre Brasseur (Doctor Génessier), Alida Valli (Louise), Juliette Mayniel (Edna Grüber), Alexandre Rignault (Inspector Parot), Béatrice Altariba (Paulette Mérodon), François Guérin (Jacques Vernon), and Édith Scob (Christiane Génessier) Directed by Georges Franju.
Review:
Sure, you need a horror movie with a different view sometimes. This was a film that was called "in a minor genre" as if it was a critique. The director of the film even called it as one with a "quieter mood than horror...horror in homeopathic doses", while one of its starts called it a "fantastique film" (what she refers to is a term used by the French that mostly refers to a realistic framework of a story that happens to have the supernatural involved to go along with hesitation about its existence). Well, a tale of anguish involving face swapping alongside isolation sure seems like horror to me, and so here we are featuring a French movie that had a scene harrowing enough to have a few people faint when they saw it for themselves. The movie is adapted from the novel of the same name that had been written by Jean Redon. The movie had its dialogue done by Pierre Gascar while the film was adapted by Jean Redon, Claude Sautet, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac; the latter two were known as crime fiction writers that had seen plenty of their works adapted into film (most notably Les Diaboliques [1955]) to go along with occasional screenwriting such as here. The movie was directed by a documentarian-turned-feature director in Franju, who had co-formed the Cinématheque Française; his first feature had been Head Against the Wall in 1958. The film was made with careful precision as to not rile up the censors in its native France Americans did see the film, albeit with a different approach, because Lopert Pictures showed it as part of a doubleheader with The Manster...and re-titled the film as "The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus" while editing the film down (so yes, the grafting scene was trimmed...along with a scene of a doctor caring for a kid at the clinic - go figure). The reputation of the film has been considerably higher (to say the least) in the six decades since its release.
Admittedly, it is a pretty lyrical type of horror film, one that lures you in pretty quickly with an eerie atmosphere that looks and feels like elegant dread. It respects its audience enough for 90 minutes to carry its drama with patience before one gets that fateful sequence that pretty much dominates the discussion. You really can't hype up a sequence quite like this one (in the horror sense, I mean), you just have to see it for yourself when it comes to making an unsettling sequence that really does unsettle you. The sequence where the face undergoes a process of acceptance/rejection is a close second in quiet unnerving terror. The movie was shot by Eugen Schüfftan, who actually was quite famed as a cinematographer because of the special effect he created that bears his name (involving a mirror covering part of the camera view), most notably with his work in Metropolis (1927); simply put, it is a pretty stark film to view by an old pro. Scob has the toughest job as the one with a mask on their face for most of the film, which she handles with the right sense of tragic grace. Brasseur sells the tragic nature of all-consuming guilt and devotion with the dignity required, as opposed to going for the mad scientist routine, because really it isn't too far removed from say, Frankenstein when it comes to trying to defy the moral line of flesh and man. The finale resolves itself with that delicate sort of balance that comes with unsettling peace in the cold night. In general, one can approach the film however they like when it comes to unsettling features that has one absorbing what they just saw and heard and having to think about it for quite a while after the fact.
Overall, I give it 9 out of 10 stars.
Less than two weeks to Halloween but the fun doesn't stop there, the slate for the days ahead includes killer spawn, dolls, vampires, and maybe even a bedeviled doubleheader...
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