A lyrical poem written with a scalpel. A Brothers Grimm fairytale filtered through the cold objectivity of a surgical textbook. If one had to distill the essence of Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face" into a single, impossible image, this would be it: a cognitive dissonance that crystallizes the sublime collision between the most visceral horror and an ethereal, almost unbearable beauty. The film unfolds with the gait of a waking nightmare, a fever dream in which the grace of a swan moves to the notes of a funeral dirge.

Franju, emerging from the ranks of surrealism and possessing the mercilessly sharp eye of a documentarian (one need only think of Le sang des bêtes), had no interest in horror as a genre of cheap scares. His approach is that of a poet who chooses to compose his verses not with ink, but with blood and tears. The plot, adapted from Jean Redon's novel of the same name, has an archetypal simplicity that borders on the mythological. Doctor Génessier, a luminary of plastic surgery played by a magnificently monolithic Pierre Brasseur, is consumed by guilt for having disfigured his daughter, Christiane, in a car accident. His mission—which warps medical ethics into a form of monstrous paternal love—is to restore her face, quite literally. To do so, he kidnaps young women with the help of his loyal and inscrutable assistant Louise (an enigmatic and tragic Alida Valli), then attempts to graft their skin onto his daughter's ravaged face.

The emotional and iconic heart of the film is, of course, Christiane. Played by an unforgettable Edith Scob, she lives a spectral existence confined to her father's villa, her non-face concealed by a rigid, expressionless white mask that recalls both neoclassical sculptures and de Chirico's mannequins. It is an absence that becomes an overwhelming presence. The mask, chilling in its artificial serenity, transforms Christiane into an instant cinematic icon, a phantom wandering the corridors of her own gilded cage. Deprived of the ability to express herself through facial movement, Scob performs entirely with her eyes—the titular "yeux"—which become wells of infinite melancholy, terror, and, finally, rebellion. They are the sole survivors of her identity, windows to a soul trapped in a body that no longer belongs to her. In this, Christiane becomes a kind of post-modern Ophelia, a creature of pure poetry condemned to float through a world of brutal, scientific prose.

Doctor Génessier, on the other hand, is a direct descendant of a long line of Promethean scientists, from Mary Shelley's Doctor Frankenstein to H.G. Wells's Doctor Moreau. Yet Franju strips him of any mad-scientist grandiosity. Génessier is not a megalomaniac screaming, "It's alive!" but a cold, methodical, bourgeois professional. His madness is not explosive but implosive, rooted in a mixture of arrogance, guilt, and a paternal love so distorted it becomes the very opposite of its intent. His laboratory is not a Gothic castle amidst lightning bolts, but a modern, aseptic clinic, which makes the horror all the more disturbing. His ambition is not to create life, but to restore it, to mold and correct it like an imperfect work of art. In this, he is closer to a dark Pygmalion or, more precisely still, to Scottie Ferguson in Hitchcock's Vertigo, released just two years prior: both are men obsessed with the desperate attempt to reshape a woman according to a lost ideal, ignoring the will and identity of the subject herself.

The film's most celebrated and controversial sequence, the heterograft, is a masterpiece of direction that perfectly synthesizes Franju's approach. Shot with the clinical precision of a medical documentary, the scene shows the process of removing the face of one of the victims in a single, long close-up. There is no music to underscore the tension, only the metallic and moist sounds of surgical instruments. The effect is nauseating yet strangely hypnotic, a "terrible ballet" that transforms a most barbarous act into an almost ritualistic procedure. It was a scene that, upon its release in 1960, caused fainting and protests, but today it appears not so much as gratuitous gore but as the most honest and merciless depiction of the violence inherent in Génessier's obsession. Franju forces us to watch, to not look away, because it is precisely in this objectification of the body, in this reduction of a person to mere biological material, that the true horror resides.

"Eyes Without a Face" is steeped in an atmosphere that seems to spring directly from the recesses of Gothic literature, particularly that of Edgar Allan Poe. The isolated villa, the imprisoned maiden, the beauty perpetually associated with death and decay, the love that transmutes into a form of necrophilic sadism: all are elements that could have been lifted from "The Fall of the House of Usher" or "Ligeia." Yet Franju grafts them onto an unmistakably modern context, that of post-war France, a nation obsessed with reconstruction and the need to hide its own scars. In an almost meta-textual reading, Génessier's obsession with the perfect surface, with a flawless face to be applied over a wounded reality, can be seen as a potent metaphor for Gaullist France, intent on projecting an image of renewed greatness while the wounds of war and collaboration were still fresh and festering beneath the surface.

Maurice Jarre's score, with its distorted funfair themes and unsettling, dreamlike melodies, contributes decisively to this feeling of a macabre fairytale, a parallel world where the logic of the everyday is suspended. The film moves in a limbo between realism and oneirism, a territory later to be explored, with different sensibilities, by directors like David Lynch. The influence of "Eyes Without a Face" is vast and subterranean. It can be traced in the expressionless mask of Michael Myers in Halloween, in the perverse surgery of Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (a veritable homage), and even, in a hyperbolic and hyper-kinetic form, in the core concept of John Woo's Face/Off.

But it is in its finale that the film transcends genre and ascends to the realm of pure visual poetry. After finally committing her act of rebellion—releasing the dogs and doves her father used as test subjects—Christiane wanders off into the night. Her new face, already decaying, is a mask of dead flesh, but for the first time, she is free. Surrounded by the dogs that have just mauled their tormentor, a dove alighting gently on her hand, Christiane walks towards the woods. She is neither monster nor victim, but a kind of pagan saint, an angel of destruction and liberation. It is one of the most indelibly beautiful and disturbing images in cinema history, a conclusion that offers not solutions, but an enigmatic catharsis. Franju closes his tale not with a moral, but with a visual epiphany that reasserts the primacy of poetry over brutality, proving that even from the deepest horror, a form of tragic, unforgettable, and faceless beauty can bloom.