"What pleases is what is terrible, gentle, and poetic" --Georges Franju. A brilliant plastic surgeon by his reckless driving causes the disfigurement of his beautiful daughter, Christiane. Determined to outwit cruel fate with a crueller science, the doctor (Pierre Brasseur) lures unsuspecting young women to his country home/laboratory where he attempts to graft their facial features onto Christiane's ruined visage. The Grand Guignol premise of Eyes Without a Face is ironically enhanced by Franju's near-documentary interest in his subject (one is reminded of his documentary on slaughterhouses, Blood of the Beasts). But in its shimmering, fantasy-inspired visuals, this is a film in the tradition of French poetic realism-crossed with German expressionism. What stays in the mind is not the suffering of the doctor's other victims but of Christiane (Edith Scob), wandering the lonely halls of her parental home, eyes of pain staring out from behind the kabuki-like mask designed to hide her disfigurement from herself while her father attempts to remake her in his mind's image. She slips ever so gracefully into madness, where her identification with the tortured animals all around her achieves its poetic culmination.