The pleasures of watching Goodnight Mommy are very few, but those few pleasures are tremendously rewarding. The film is beautifully photographed, for one. Filmed in Austria, the movie is set largely inside a modern glass home in the middle of the country, surrounded by natural beauty and pastoral fields and farmland. The architectural sophistication of the home is matched by the sophistication of the story at the center of Goodnight Mommy: for an hour this is an art-house horror movie, unfolding in one direction then taking turn after turn into new reaches and ever more disturbing depths.
There are familiar pieces to Goodnight Mommy. Off-kilter twins, for example, are nothing new in the movies. This time brothers Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwartz) are home alone, spending their days in the nearby lake, fields, and forests, as they await the return of their mother from the hospital. When their mother (played by Susanne Wuest) returns, her face an
d head are wrapped in bandages. Whatever trauma she has undergone has left her in agony, and she spends most of her time in the house, in the dark, away from the boys.
She would, in all likelihood, scare most children.
Being kids, and afraid, Lukas and Elias begin to think that maybe this woman is not their mother. “She’s different,” Lukas says. Lukas is particularly skeptical. Elias is less sure, but the brothers go about trying to discover if the woman in their home is truly their mother. Some of the ways they do this are harmless, like putting a baby monitor under her bed to listen to her when she’s alone. Other attempts are harder to understand, like releasing cockroaches over her sleeping body.
What unfolds in this investigation is hard to characterize without giving away too much. Suffice it to say that Goodnight Mommy is a horror movie, and a seriously disturbing one at that. The questions that underliethe story, who is the mother, what’s going on with these twins, where is everyone else, all move in unexpected directions. The horror elements in the film are present from the start, and they are largely psychological in nature, until that time when they become very, very physical.
Goodnight Mommy gets as dark as films do. But its subject matter earns that darkness. At one point we learn the boys’ father was killed in the same accident that disfigured their mother. We learn her distance is in part physical, but in large part, also, emotional. We are asked about tragedy and suffering, about whether one can move on in life after suffering trauma, and these are some of the hardest questions we are ever asked in life.
Goodnight Mommy looks into this darkness and doesn’t flinch. It’s the kind of movie that is hard to recommend, not because it is bad, but because its appeal is narrowed by its disturbing subject matter. Make no mistake, Goodnight Mommy is a hard one to watch. But if you’re up for it, it’s very much worth the experience.
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