“Goodnight Mommy” is a slow burn thriller. It will test your
patience big time but it pays off in the end because it essentially tricks you.
Co directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz do an effective job of framing
the action from a very subjective viewpoint (two young twin boys) and then
completely flip the script on us during the last thirty minutes or so. It’s
similar to a novel using the unreliable narrator device.
Set in the Austrian countryside, “Goodnight Mommy” revolves
around Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz) as they move to a new house
with their mother (played by Susanne West) in the wake of a serious accident.
It’s a sleek luxury house in the midst of a gorgeous property, complete with a
cornfield, a lush wooded area and a pond. Soon enough, Lukas and Elias begin to
have doubts about their mother. She’s recently had facial reconstructive
surgery, leaving her entire head covered in bandages. She looks different and
seems to act different--cold and distant, demanding that all the window blinds
be closed and the house is absolutely silent. Soon enough they begin to suspect
that the person hidden under those bandages isn’t their mother.
The genius of “Goodnight Mommy” is in how little information
we’re given. Fiala and Franz (who also wrote the script) resist the urge to
talk down to the audience and lay everything out neatly. There’s been an
accident but we don’t find out what exactly happened. Mother (we don’t find out
her real name) is in bandages but we don’t know how her face was disfigured in
the first place. Lukas and Elias’s father is absent but again, we don’t know
why. The movie is highly observant—major story and character developments are
communicated through subtle action and scant dialogue. It’s a movie that
requires your complete attention.
This method of sharing limited information allows the film
to be told from Lukas and Elias’s scared and uncertain perspective. Fiala and
Franz devote a lot of time to establishing and strengthening their sibling
bond. Chasing each other through the corn maze, playfully hitting each other
while in the bathtub, or holing up in their room trying to hide from Mother.
Meanwhile, Mother is always depicted as this mysterious, looming presence,
creepily watching the boys from her bedroom window, or staying confined to her
bed. We come to view her as a stranger just as they do. There aren’t any
flashbacks. We don’t know what Mother or the twins were like before the
accident. All we have to go on is the present situation and what Fiala and
Franz choose to show us. “Goodnight
Mommy” is a smart, well made film that forces the audience to fill in the gaps
and try to construct the whole picture.
Additionally, the film’s central dilemma (brothers who don’t
recognize their own mother) is always intriguing because it works in a surface
level genre thriller way (if this isn’t their mother, then who is she and what
does she want?) and penetrates to a deeper more psychological level pertaining
to parenthood and maternity. How hard would it be if one day you didn’t
recognize your own mother and were scared of her? And on the flip side: as a
parent, what if your own kids, your own flesh and blood, viewed you as a
stranger, as their enemy?
When the trailer for “Goodnight Mommy” hit the web four or
five weeks ago, a number of websites dubbed it “the scariest movie trailer of
all time.” Now whether or not that’s indeed true is irrelevant but I’m guessing
the film itself will not be remembered as the “scariest movie of all time,” or
even close. Except for a few eerie dream sequences, the picture is mostly calm
and mundane instead of terrifying; Olga Neuwirth’s score is scarcely used and
it moves at a leisurely pace. But this isn’t the picture’s fault (movie
marketing in general is constantly deceiving) and if “Mommy” isn’t a horror
film it’s an expertly crafted psychological thriller.
“Goodnight Mommy” will be too slow for some but for those
who are patient, it delivers big time—the explosive last half hour is
disturbing and uncomfortable (the closest the picture does come to horror) and
delivers one last unexpected twist.
B+
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