Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes

Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes tells the story of a disruptive couple in a '60s gothic setting.

Margot (Luisa Taraz) has inherited a castle, which is visited with her curmudgeonly husband Dieter (played superbly by Frederik von Lüttichau).

The first half skillfully delivers a psychogram of this toxic relationship, amid the surreal castle where space and time seem to have their own rules.

But it is in the second half that the film takes an unexpected new direction - and everything that happened before is reinterpreted once again.

Visually stunning with a great soundtrack and very clever screenplay, this is definitely a film that needs to be watched a second time to fully grasp all the different layers hidden in the story.

This was probably my favorite film of FrightFest this year, but also the hardest to write a review about. Mainly because the plot is so delicate and multi layered that anything I write could spoil the wonderful experience.

All I can write is that "Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes" is a brilliant, atmospheric, thought provoking and beautifully shot (!!) throwback to gothic horror that is so much more than it lets on.

It's a film that I had to think about a lot after having watched it, because there is just so much happening, and every little detail has so much meaning. It's a film you want to re watch again and again.

While some might be frustrated that the film doesn't hand out everything on a silver platter, it's a much more engaging film that forces the viewers to really think about what they just witnessed and to connect the dots themselves.

So happy that FrightFest chose to show this film!

While I was expecting a somewhat decent homage to gothic horror of the 70s, Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes goes much deeper.

Now, don't get me wrong - the film is a loving tribute to Euro horror of the 60s and 70s and especially fans of Bava and Rollin will be sure to have a great time - but I was particularly impressed by the shift (both narratively and in tone) the story takes around the halfway mark.

Without spoiling anything, I can say that the story evolves and morphs into something much more profound and thought provoking than it first appears - resulting in a unique cinema experience that is as visually captivating as it is clever.

Story-wise, it starts with a couple driving towards an old castle at night. The husband is an imposing one, the wife forbearing. The place which the wife is supposed to inherit, the richer of the two, has been left in a derelict form. It is a place, not simply housing unknown horror, but a locus to test their character i.e., habit, disposition, and morals.

The rest shall be left for the viewer to find out.

The movie has a multilayered narrative. It expects a lot of competence from the viewer's side to make sense.

The cinematography is magical. A love letter, indeed.

The sound editing is fantastic. And performance? To quote from the movie "You were born for this role".

The film students and nerds "of the higher order" will certainly be busy breaking it down piece by piece and then pulling it together again to see what becomes of it. But the average viewer with expectations of good old thrills and jump scares are not going to be able to enjoy it to the end.

It is a movie that not only pays homage to the horror cinema of the late 60s and early 70s but attempts a critique with the purpose of turning movies of the yore inside out. Does it succeed? By large, Yes.

But the more important question is this: as an average viewer do you really want to witness this success?

I see reviews here calling this movie multilayered and an homage to classic Euro-horror. I call it boring. It's not scary, nothing happens. It wants you to think you're watching one movie, then in the middle it shifts to something very different. Neither are very interesting. Maybe the movie is more interesting to Germans and Europeans, or maybe people enthralled with the movies this one is based on, than to this American. This seems to be horror for failed art students. Even looking at the reviews with spoilers, no one seems to explain what this movie is about or what the point is. Some of the characters are on drugs, maybe the viewer should be as well. If I understand the moral of this story, the TV show Lost (2004) did it better.