A photographer who sees through a killer’s eyes
In Eyes of Laura Mars, released in 1978 and directed by Irvin Kershner, Faye Dunaway plays Laura Mars, a glamorous New York fashion photographer whose work specialises in stylised, violent imagery: models posed as victims, surrounded by danger, photographed with a cold, beautiful precision. One night, Laura begins to have visions. She sees murders as they happen, through the eyes of the murderer, and she discovers that the victims are people connected to her own life: friends, colleagues, and models from her circle. Dunaway plays Laura’s terror with a control that makes it more disturbing. She does not scream for long. She watches, she tries to understand, and she slowly realises that her art, which treats violence as style, may be connected to real violence in ways she cannot control.
The film was based on a story by John Carpenter, who co-wrote the screenplay with David Zelag Goodman, and it was produced as a star vehicle for Dunaway just after her Oscar win for Network. Kershner, who would later direct The Empire Strikes Back, films New York as a place of glossy surfaces and hidden danger: fashion studios, galleries, and elegant apartments that look safe but are not. Dunaway is perfect for that world. Laura Mars is confident, successful, and accustomed to being looked at, and Dunaway shows how that confidence collapses when Laura becomes the person doing the looking, involuntarily, through a killer’s eyes. The visions are filmed from the murderer’s point of view, so the audience shares Laura’s horror: we see what she sees, and we cannot look away.
Art, violence, and responsibility
Eyes of Laura Mars is, at heart, a film about the relationship between images and violence. Laura’s photographs are controversial. Feminists protest them, journalists question them, and Laura defends them as art, as a way of confronting the violence of the world rather than hiding from it. Dunaway plays that defence with intelligence and defiance. Laura is not a naive artist. She knows her work is provocative, and she believes provocation has value. But as the murders continue, Dunaway lets doubt creep into Laura’s certainty. If her photographs aestheticise violence, have they encouraged it? If she sees through the killer’s eyes, is she complicit in what he does? The film does not offer simple answers, and Dunaway’s performance is strongest in its ambiguities.
Opposite Dunaway, Tommy Lee Jones plays Lieutenant John Neville, the detective assigned to protect Laura and investigate the murders. Their relationship is a classic thriller pairing: the sceptical policeman and the gifted witness, drawn together by danger and by attraction. Dunaway and Jones have a prickly, intelligent chemistry. Neville does not believe Laura at first, and Laura does not trust Neville’s methods, but they learn to work together as the killer comes closer. Dunaway is particularly good in their quieter scenes, when Laura tries to explain a vision she cannot prove, and Neville tries to protect a woman he does not fully understand. The romance that develops is tentative and haunted, which suits a film about seeing and being seen.
A thriller of its moment
Eyes of Laura Mars belongs to a late-1970s cycle of stylish thrillers that mixed horror, fashion, and urban anxiety. Its New York is the New York of discos, galleries, and late-night streets, a city that feels both exciting and unsafe. Kershner uses that atmosphere well, and Dunaway’s Laura is its ideal guide: a woman who has made a career from the city’s surfaces, and who now discovers its depths. The supporting cast, including Brad Dourif as Laura’s troubled driver, René Auberjonois as her agent, and Raúl Juliá as her former husband, adds to the sense of a closed, glamorous world in which everyone knows everyone else, and therefore everyone is a suspect.
The film’s famous visual idea, the killer’s-eye view, was influential, and it works because Dunaway sells Laura’s experience of it. She does not merely react to horror. She tries to interpret it, to remember details, to use her photographer’s eye to identify places, weapons, and victims. Dunaway plays that process as a kind of terrible work: Laura is forced to become a witness to crimes she cannot prevent, and the effort exhausts her. In the film’s climax, when Laura confronts the killer and the truth about his identity is revealed, Dunaway’s performance shifts from terror to a kind of exhausted recognition. The horror was closer than she thought, and it was connected to her own life in ways she had refused to see.
Dunaway after the Oscar
Coming after Network, Eyes of Laura Mars showed that Dunaway could carry a commercial thriller on star power alone, and that she was willing to take risks with genre material. The film was a box-office success, even if critics were divided about its plot, and it remains a cult favourite for its atmosphere, its fashion photography, and its central performance. Dunaway’s Laura is not a victim in the passive sense. She investigates, she argues, she fights back, and she survives by using the very gift that tormented her. That active heroine, intelligent and flawed, is characteristic of Dunaway’s best work in this period.
It is also a performance that rewards rewatching. On a first viewing, the audience follows the mystery: who is the killer, and how is he connected to Laura? On a second viewing, Dunaway’s work becomes clearer. Notice how she photographs, how she looks at her own images, and how her confidence in her art slowly turns into fear. Laura Mars is a woman who made violence beautiful, and then discovered that beauty could not protect her from violence. Dunaway plays that discovery without moralising, which makes it more powerful. She lets the audience decide what Laura’s art means, and whether her success was worth its price.
Why Laura Mars endures
Laura endures because she embodies a question that has only become more urgent: what happens when images of violence become entertainment, and when the people who make those images become part of the story? Dunaway, herself one of the most photographed women of her era, understood that question from the inside. She plays Laura as a woman who is both creator and subject, both observer and victim, and she never simplifies that double position.
Watch Eyes of Laura Mars for its suspense and its New York atmosphere, but watch Dunaway for the portrait of an artist under pressure. Notice how she holds a camera, how she studies a photograph, and how her face changes when a vision begins. Laura Mars is a thriller heroine with a real interior life, and Dunaway gives her the intelligence, glamour, and vulnerability that make the film’s horror feel personal rather than mechanical. It is a signature role in a different key: not the cool executive or the tragic noir heroine, but a working artist forced to see the world through someone else’s cruel eyes.