REVIEW: Piercing [2019]

The terror must be in English. A marriage between the gorgeously disturbing imagery Nicolas Pesce delivered via his debut The Eyes of My Mother and the surreally warped sensibilities of Audition author RyĆ» Murakami definitely piqued my interest as far as the former’s adaptation of the latter’s novel Piercing. This psycho-thriller concerns new father Reed’s (Christopher Abbott) need to briefly leave his wife (Laia Costa‘s Mona) and the baby he can’t stop himself from wanting to stab with an ice pick in order to find a prostitute with which to…

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FANTASIA16 REVIEW: The Eyes of My Mother [2016]

“Why would I kill you? You’re my only friend.” This is isolation, suffering. It’s also normal. We on the outside see Nicolas Pesce‘s debut feature The Eyes of My Mother as the former, young Francisca (Olivia Bond) swimming in a pool of abject dread as death proves a natural evolution for all living things. For this girl, however, nothing depicted onscreen is wrong. Nothing is out-of-place. She’s the daughter of a former Portuguese surgeon, a mother (Diana Agostini) who was as much a guardian and teacher as she was a…

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