One of my favorite horror movies of 2016? Nicolas Pesce’s austere and disturbing black and white drama “The Eyes Of My Mother,” a startling directorial debut. Featuring no known stars to speak of, the slow-burn horror thriller centers on a woman traumatized by the death of her parents at a young age. With little guidance as she grows up, the girl’s fascination with the surgical, a skill passed down from her mother, takes a dark and twisted turn. It’s not just chilling psycho-horror either as a rich, if troubled, humanity bleeds out of the picture too (our review from Sundance 2016).
Evidently, people were watching Pesce’s talents from the get go. You’d think the filmmaker would have a exciting new project lined-up. But in fact, Mia Wasikowska and Christopher Abbott (“James White,” “The Sleepwalker”) have already wrapped production on Pesce’s next film a psychological thriller called “Piercing.”
Based on Ryu Murakami’s 1994 novel of the same name, the drama centers on a married man on a business trip planning to kill an unsuspecting prostitute. His plans are thwarted by a mysterious call girl which leads to a pulsating game of cat-and-mouse. Here’s the book’s Amazon synopsis:
A pulsating psycho-thriller from Ryu Murakami, author of In the Miso Soup. A renaissance man for the postmodern age, Ryu Murakami — a musician, filmmaker (Tokyo Decadence), TV personality, and award-winning author — has gained a cult following in the West. His first novel, Almost Transparent Blue, won Japan’s most coveted literary prize and sold over a million copies, and his most recent psychosexual thriller, In the Miso Soup, gave readers a further taste of his incredibly agile imagination. In Piercing, Murakami, in his own unique style, explores themes of child abuse and what happens to the voiceless among us, weaving a disturbing, spare tale of two people who find each other and then are forced into hurting each other deeply because of the haunting specter of their own abuse as children.
Of the project, then unnamed, Pesce told The Playlist, “We’re actually about to shoot a new movie which deals with similar themes, but it is a very different movie than ‘The Eyes Of My Mother,’” he explained. “But we do play again with the question of what could lead you to kill, what would put you on the brink of crossing that line and committing such an act. It’s an adaptation, but I can’t reveal details any further than that.”
Additional cast members includes Laia Costa (“Victoria”), Maria Dizzia (“Martha Marcy May Marlene”), Wendell Pierce (“Treme”) and Marin Ireland (“Hell or High Water”). Add “Piercing” to 2018’s most anticipated because after just one film, Pesce is a promising filmmaker to watch. [Variety]
