Film

Anguish (1987)

Director: Bigas Luna

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

A strikingly original, intricately constructed, and extremely gruesome horror film about a mother-fixated opthalmologist's assistant with an unhealthy interest in eyeballs. 'Soon' says his diminutive mother (Rubenstein), 'all the eyes in the city will be ours' - and she means it. Using creepily effective ultra close-ups and a clever Chinese box structure, Luna introduces another level of voyeuristic disturbance by allowing the events in this film-within-the-film to spill out into the auditorium (it's a case of who's watching who when?), where a teenage girl in the audience is becoming increasingly disturbed by the twitchy antics of a popcorn-eating man. The execution doesn't always match the boldness of the conception, but this post-modern shocker intelligently exploits the notion that horror is in the eye of the beholder.

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