Listening Eyes
2017 · 30m · France
Directed by Julie Colly
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
A bored teenage girl spending the holidays at her father's country house becomes a voyeur of the young vacationing couple next door, her curiosity pulling her into uncharted territory.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Listening Eyes plays it straight when it could've been genuinely perverse—the voyeurism angle promises transgression but settles into melancholy coming-of-age beats everyone's seen before. It's competent ennui, which is exactly the kind of thing I'd skip.
Colly locates herself squarely in the European art-house tradition of adolescent psychological realism, with deliberate pacing and compositional restraint that recalls Haneke's early work; the formal distance between observer and observed becomes the film's argumentative spine.
The film's real lever is the sound design—the way ambient noise from the neighbors' house bleeds into the girl's interior space, collapsing the boundary between watching and absorbing, turns a modest premise into something that burrows under your skin without ever announcing itself.
Reviews
Young actress, Lilith Grasmug, embodies an authentic bundle of teen nerves and mellow angst. A performance engaging enough to hold the story up, which is nearly all hers. Listening Eyes might be a film about growing up, more than many other films claim to be.