From the opening archive footage of a German family singing a lullaby dressed in traditional clothing there’s never a hint of Goodnight Mommy ending up where it does. In fact, for large periods it’s even debatable this is a horror. But a horror is what it most definitely becomes, finding terror in the ordinary.
Real life brothers Lukas and Elias are twin ten-year-olds roaming the fields surrounding their isolated, modern summer home as they await the return of the mother (Wuest), due any day now from hospital where she underwent cosmetic surgery. When she does return home, blackened, bloodshot eyes peering out from a heavily bandaged face, the boys begin to suspect that she’s not their mother. She’s meaner, stricter and refuses to talk to Lukas. With tension rising the young boys feel they have no choice but to resort to violence…
An allegory for a child seeing a parent in a totally different light post a divorce/separation. The child of a divorce struggles to understand that they are no longer the centre of the parent’s universe, becomes aware that the parent has a life outside of the home that the child has nothing or little to do with them (the original title translates as I See, I See). A safety net, which until now they weren’t even conscious of, has been yanked out from under them. But directing duo of Fiala and Franz (the latter the writer of Ulrich Siedl’s Paradise trilogy and the misery-fest Import/Export) aren’t prepared to leave it there, taking it further… and then further again.
Lukas and Elias are so adamant that this woman is not their mother they begin to convince the audience: Is she really unable to recognise the woman in the picture she has her arm around or is she not going to play along with this silly line of questioning? But then there is a real unexpected development. And then a twist on top of that, a twist that’s disguised with no little skill.
Fiala and Franz are patient, drip-feeding important backstory and slowly cranking up the tension before they let all hell break loose. The house, beautiful but isolated, takes on an ominous atmosphere with Fiala and Franz’s slow tracking shots through hallways, darkened by the drawn blinds. The lack of soundtrack, the photos of the narcissistic mother, arty and blurred, that dominate the walls, and the cockroaches the boys keep as pets, further heighten the creepy vibe.
Chilling stuff.
