Goodnight Mommy
A terrifying enigma that will keep you on the edge of reality!
It is no secret that I am a horror fanatic and with one of my favorite dates around
the corner what better way to start October than with this Austrian thriller. A little
known film shot beautifully on 35mm and in all aspects a low-budget film made
with a budget of only $0.3million, that in Hollywood terms its about the cost of
blockbuster’s crew meal plan.
Goodnight Mommy is an impeccable creepy film that from the beginning
foreshadows the story that would develop without telling too much and saving the
shock for the grand finale. From the beginning the film is an enigma and the setting
is just as weird. An ultra sterile modernist home set in the Austrian country side
surrounded by forests and corn fields, twin brothers Luka and Elias (played by
real-life brothers Lukas and Elias Schwartz) pass the time by playing ominous
games wearing handmade cardboard masks while waiting for their mother
(Susanne West) to return home from a surgical procedure. One thing you will notice
from the beginning is the use of reflections through out the film and the blurry
imagery through out the house along side the ghoulish antique dolls. To top of the
creepy factor, the face of “mom”, is obscured by bandages and the amazing use of
shadows through out the house for a great part of the film. The boys from the
beginning are preternaturally in sync with one another, even by the standards of
identical twins, and now they both do not believe that the woman underneath the
bandages is their mother.
Although it takes times to discover what is going on, the story develops a sense of
uncertainty that begins to develop into paranoia. When the film’s secrets are finally
revealed you do not know protagonist from antagonists, and leaves you
re-evaluating everything that developed before you.
Written and directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, Goodnight Mommy is a
beautiful piece of work in every aspect of the word. What makes this film such a
surprise is that although the film is subtitled the lack of dialog through out makes it
easy to follow by not having the viewer reading a thousand words a scene. It is
deliberately paced and mundane with shock free plotting for the most part,
something that is unfamiliar by American Horror standards. The lack of the cheesy
Hollywood jump-scares is that makes this film a breath of fresh air and terrifying,
replacing it rather with amazing cinematography and story telling that delivers a
final punch that will leave you breathless.
Goodnight Mommy takes terror to it’s core and plays a trick (a fair trick) on the
audience by playing a poker faced hand, but yet abiding by the conventional
cinematic storytelling that lacks in most of the current films of present day. Fiala
and Franz have pulled an impressive psychological drama that will be tough to top
by anyone in a near future. Although it will not be for just any audience, Goodnight
Mommy will satisfy the most picky of fans of the horror genre an impressive feat by
a pair of directors on their fiction feature debut.
9 out of 10
By Hiram Trillo
