My Mother’s Eyes (Frightfest 2023)(Review)

For an entire generation of horror fans, the movies that came out of Japan around the turn of the millennium were crucial stopovers in our journey of cinematic discovery. They fell under the collective-yet-reductive umbrella of “J-Horror”, which had slowly burned out by the mid-’00s, but in 2023 the smouldering embers of the sub-genre have shown a flicker of revival. From 2017’s One Shot of the Dead to last year’s excellent New Religion (REVIEW), and this year’s My Mother’s Eyes by Takeshi Kushida – his follow-up to 2020’s Woman of the Photographs.

Kushida’s style is a far cry from the suburban hellscapes that defined the J-Horror cycle of the ’00s, and even though it has been included in this year’s frightfest (before the third act) it’s more of a straight drama, albeit with a searing and heartbreaking undercurrent.

In a pristine white home of upper middle-class Japanese idyll lives Hitomi and her daughter, Eri, – both of whom are cellists at different stages of their musical careers and their futures look promising, but fate has different, horrible ideas in mind. Hitomi is suffering from sudden onset of ocular distress causing her vision to rapidly degrade, which can be seen through several erratically edited and, ironically, visually stunning sequences. During one of these episodes she and her daughter are involved in a car accident which causes Eri to become paralysed from the neck down, while Hitomi is pushed over the edge into total blindness.

Both mother and daughter require constant care and supervision, but the hospital in which which they are staying has all but left them to fend for themselves, and Hitomi’s only real release is having her phone read articles to her. It’s from these that she discovers a potential solution to her problem in the form of experimental contact lenses and the use of VR. Unfortunately Eri’s situation is much more severe, and in a heartbreaking moment she shares the movie’s best scene with her mother. The teenager says that she doesn’t like Hitomi touching her arm as she can’t feel a thing, she then talks about being allowed to die because when she sleeps, the only dream she has is of staring at the ceiling, and whether asleep or awake, alive or dead, everything has become indistinguishable. It’s a powerful and crushing scene that is tonally akin to Tsukamoto’s overlooked and tragically sad mid-career triumph, Vital. 

Like his previous film, Kushida continues to look at themes of voyeurism in My Mother’s Eyes, but the horror this time is subtle, and centred on bodily autonomy. What Hitomi can see is transplanted onto a phone app that can tinker with how much light her eyes take in, allowing the colour palette to vary wildly in its more excessive moments. More central, however, is the idea that the people behind the “revolutionary” contact lenses can also see what Hitomi sees through a phone app. The aloof and insidious father and son duo behind this technology corrupt Hitomi’s experiences for their own ends, perusing her life with an unpleasant invasiveness, and although their reasoning is explained, it also asks several questions that the film has little interest in answering.

Everything is smooth sailing, until the third act which sees the movie at its most challenging and its weakest. Kushida takes the conceptual works to its natural conclusion, but it also has traits that you would find in a more straight forward slasher. Reintroducing the journalist who helped connect Hitomi and the creators of this app/contact lenses sees people stabbed with glass and other implements which I shall not spoil. And while scenes like that work within the confines of a horror festival, it doesn’t gel well with the ideas and emotional character work that led the film to this point. Worse, the slasher trimmings does My Mother’s Eyes a disservice.

At 90 minutes it feels slow for a festival movie, yet when dealing with abstract concepts – My Mother’s Eyes is a rewarding experience. With multiple characters sharing bodily functions, minds, and possibly even their souls, and an inexplicable ending that had me scratching my head, this film certainly goes to weird lengths. It’s also probably best not asking any technical questions of this humble sci-fi/horror as it takes some big leaps of logic and the idea of “pairing devices”, answers that simutaenously spoil and explain the joys of the movie’s title.

The ideas and themes that are persued are interesting and the visuals have an inventiveness that sees the movie stray into body horror adjacent territories. Let it be said too that the violence and characters musicality butting heads is either deeply hilarious or a bridge too far. Maybe even both. Yet, My Mother’s Eyes is a more contemplative horror and acquired taste, but whether Kushida’s film is a hit or miss, it’s bold swings like this that will help the once titanic J-Horror scene reinvent itself for its potential third wave.

Rob’s Archive – My Mother’s Eyes