Georges Franju's 1960 movie Eyes Without A Face may have the elements of classic horror — a doctor driven to tinker with nature watches the tragic results of his failed experiments — but it's so different in tone and purpose from a typical shocker that it feels more like a meditation on identity and perfection.

Dr. Génessier is trying to perfect a skin grafting technique that allows him, among other things, to replace people's faces. He was involved in a car accident that injured the face of his daughter, Christiane, and after an unknown number of failed attempts to repair the damage, he has left her without a face at all. The movie picks up the story there, with Christiane holed up in her father's giant house, withdrawn from society, usually wearing a mask, prowling around the corridors like a cat. Génessier thinks he's a hairsbreadth away from cracking the secrets of skin grafts and finally putting this entire episode behind him. Behind them.

All he needs are fresh faces, and so like a spider he catches a girl in his web, takes her back to his lab, and wraps her in a cocoon on a gurney, unconscious, where he and his assistant, Louise, begin the gruesome procedure.

Génessier's understanding of identity is so paradoxical that the movie provokes the question: where does individuality lie? Génessier apparently believes that it lies within and that faces are, therefore, transmissible, but at the same time he's so fixated on surfaces that he refuses to see past them. He recoils in horror when he sees that his daughter isn't wearing her mask. He covers all of the mirrors in the house with drapes. He presses Louise's choker of pearls down to cover the scar on her neck, the only evidence that she was previously a patient herself, wincing when he sees it slightly exposed. Louise is just as reluctant to acknowledge what she and Génessier are doing: when one procedure goes horribly wrong, she helps the doctor tote the body of the victim to a crypt, but she covers her ears and smiles at the appearance of a plane passing overhead, drowning out the sounds of digging.

Once identities become shiftable, bodies become interchangeable. The most understated example of this may be a sequence in a police station where a woman is seated across from an officer's desk. The way she's shot, with her long coat and porcelain jaw, she could be Christiane. Out of the house! But the next shot, which looks over the officer's shoulder, reveals that it's not Christiane but a friend of one of the victims. She's filing a missing person report. After she leaves the station, another officer who's been taking a statement from a different woman comes to the foreground, and the two men discuss the case of the missing women, all of a similar type. As they list the physical traits — eye color, hair color — the composition of the shot puts the other woman between them, sitting still like a piece of furniture, her back to the camera. "What should I do with my blue-eyed one," one officer asks, motioning toward her. "Better keep her around. She might be useful," says his partner.

Women slip into each other's place, regardless of who they are, regardless of whose name is on the crypt, what ailment brought them to the hospital, or what malfeasance brought them to the police station. Like Dr. Génessier, the camera equates them. Like Génessier it fixates on their surfaces. It watches the grizzly face removal at length, quietly observing as incisions are made and skin is separated from the skull, but when Christiane looms unmasked over a woman on a gurney, the shot is out of focus, dark, and terminates abruptly. Look away. Cover your ears.

One of the few glimpses we get of the doctor's day job is his mysterious examination of a little boy. Génessier asks him how many fingers he's holding up. The boy makes a guess, but he's wrong. The doctor removes his own glasses and rubs his eyes, frustrated. The mother asks if the boy will get better, and the doctor says, "Trust me," which is how he blames others for their lack of faith, preemptively, just before things go awry. All of this emphasis on eyes — the boy's, the doctor's, the holes in Christiane's mask, the movie's title — is important. The boy seems otherwise healthy, but without sight he'll never survive in a world of surfaces.

Before they worked on the script for Eyes Without A Face, Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac wrote the novel d'Entre les Morts, which was the basis for Hitchcock's Vertigo. I've only read summaries of the novel, not the novel itself, but both Eyes Without A Face and Vertigo explore similar ideas about identity divorced from the body. And like Vertigo, Eyes Without A Face arrives at a retribution straight out of a fable. Vertigo builds a sense of inevitability as Scotty marches twice through an immutable loop and watches helplessly as his creation suffers the same fate as the model on which it was based, devastated by his unwitting role as the catalyst in both cases. Vertigo has a sense of poetry not only in its themes but also in its plot, which makes it deeply unconventional, different from the murder mystery or thriller that it resembles at the outset. (I believe the cyclical structure of Samuel A. Taylor's script differs from the structure of the novel, which ends with death but not from a tower.)

Eyes Without A Face, despite its tone, stays true to its genre. What's most interesting isn't the plot, which is somewhat rote and unsatisfying in its familiarity, but the multi-layered ideas of individuality. It leaves its story with a punished doctor and an animal freed, sure, but it also leaves amid a ghostly flutter of doves and a thousand questions about what might happen next.