Shot in crisp black and white, Eyes Without a Face is a gothic fairytale, crossed between a film noir with a good old dash of psychological horror thrown in. More importantly, it’s not like anything that had come before it and it still stands up today.

| Oct 3, 2024

The whole film has a ghastly elegance that often suggests Tennessee Williams in one of his more aberrant moods.

| Feb 20, 2024

Tastefully done and exquisitely horrific, Eyes Without a Face delivers exactly the right amount of terror making it easy to see why it is such an enduring horror classic.

| Sep 30, 2023

... at once lyrical, haunting, and deviant, an elegantly horrifying classic of sadism and shadowy grace.

| Sep 9, 2023

Eyes Without a Face is a masterpiece of the highest order, and an essential study of the cruel admixture of love and hubris.

| Jun 27, 2023

Far from its poetic signifiers and predictable surface, it reaches its substantial degree of shivers when it synthesizes an incisive study of guilt, despair, and the obsession with female beauty as an instrument of body horror. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | May 2, 2023

Eyes Without a Face remains such an enduring classic because of its rich signification - its horror employs thematically haunted and evocative symbols of eyes, faces, and masks.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 12, 2022

Remarkably executed practical effects, which feel clinical and gruesome, allowing Eyes Without A Face to cross that threshold of the older style of Gothic horror.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 7, 2019

Franju and Shüfftan denature these trees. Without leaves they are skeletal, bodies without flesh. The sounds of nonmigratory birds and chained dogs barking dot the soundtrack like the trees line the picture...

| Nov 29, 2018

The viewer receives the ending in the spirit of legend, yet supplies its undertone of terror by remembering the girl's unnervingly poor prospects.

| Oct 12, 2018

Gets my prize as the sickest film since I started film criticism.

| Jul 12, 2018

The frisson nonpareil of morbid poetry

| Oct 25, 2015

This classic is poetic, disturbing, appalling, as Emily Dickinson saucily spoke of the undertaker, the 'man of the appalling trade.'

| Jun 28, 2015

Eyes Without a Face is a perfect example of how cinematic poetry can transform a seemingly disreputable movie genre.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 14, 2014

The influence of Georges Franju's horror classic Eyes Without A Face looms large, more than half a century since its release.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 14, 2014

(The film) made audiences faint and critics bristle with some of its grisly depictions.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Nov 5, 2013

A terror tale that's as poetic as it is horrific.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 26, 2013

Eyes Without A Face is a classic anomaly, out of step with its time (and any other), with mysteries that lingered long enough for critics finally to be intoxicated by them.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 14, 2013

One of those rare horror films that induces discomfort by showing practically nothing.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 6, 2013

Georges Franju's monstrous masterpiece delivers horror sans face but with a huge heart.

Full Review | Oct 6, 2013