Les Yeux sans visage

Dr. Génessier is a celebrated plastic surgeon in Paris. His daughter Christiane was disfigured in a car accident he caused. He told the world she died. She lives in his country estate outside the city, wearing a featureless white mask where her face used to be, moving quietly through the corridors, tending to the dogs kept in the kennels for experiments, and waiting. She is alive. She is not living.

Louise is Génessier's assistant and the instrument of his obsession. He restored her scarred face years earlier, and she has been his ever since. She poses as a concerned acquaintance and befriends young women in the city — students, the unattached, people whose absence will take time to be noticed. She brings them to the clinic on pretexts. Génessier sedates them, removes their faces surgically, and attempts to graft the tissue onto Christiane via a procedure he calls prosoplasty. He is trying to give her back what the accident took.

The first attempt appears to work. The tissue takes. Christiane can look at herself in a mirror for the first time in years. Then the rejection begins — the grafted face darkens, deteriorates, falls away. Génessier disposes of the body and begins searching for another donor. The police have started investigating the disappearances of young women. An inspector recruits a petty criminal named Paulette, a young woman with no family ties, to act as bait. She walks into Louise's trap and is brought to the clinic.

Christiane has been a prisoner of her father's love since the accident. She has watched what he does, understood what it costs, and carried the weight of it in silence. When Paulette is brought in, something shifts. Before the surgery, Christiane enters the room where Paulette is held. She frees her.

Then she finds Louise. She uses a scalpel. She goes to the kennels and opens the cages. The dogs find Génessier in the dark.

Christiane walks out of the estate into the night, still wearing her mask, carrying a white dove in each hand. She moves between the dark trees and disappears. The film ends without resolution — she is free, and faceless, and entirely alone, and the film declines to judge whether what she did was deliverance or something else.