Eyes Without a Face

How odd I should have to comfort you. You still have some hope, at least.

Les yeux sans visage (AKA: Eyes Without a Face) is directed by Georges Franju and collectively written by Franju, Jean Redon, Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac and Claude Sautet. It stars Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel and Francois Guerin. Music is by Maurice Jarre and cinematography by Eugen Schufftan.

Dr. Genessier (Brasseur) is wracked with guilt over the car accident he caused that saw his beloved daughter Christiane (Scob) suffer horrendous facial injuries. He has a notion to perform xenograft surgeries on female victims and transplant the face onto that of Christiane

It sounds like a classic mad scientist movie, the sort where ...

I don't think I've ever seen a film that marries the macabre and the gentle; the evil and the enlightened and the just plain horrifying in quite the way that Georges Franju does with this masterpiece. Pierre Brasseur as "Dr. Génessier" is simultaneously sinister, brutal, loving and tender as he uses every means at his disposal to try to correct an accident that has left his daughter "Christiane" (Edith Scob) disfigured. He will stop at nothing - quite literally - and the coup de grâce is still something that makes me shudder, even now. Not for the squeamish, nor is it gratuitous. It's just great.