Goodnight Mommy

Movie Gems' Review of a modern horror film ... Goodnight Mommy (aka Ich seh, Ich seh) {2014}. No spoilers!

When the trailer for Austrian horror flick "Goodnight Mommy" hit the Internet not that long ago it promptly went viral. The intriguing trailer, blessed with superb editing, got hardcore horror fans majorly "excited" ... but ... the trailer somewhat skews the real "character" of the film.

Horror fans that crave in-your-face, major scares in a movie within the genre will be very disappointed with Goodnight Mommy. It is plain and simple not that kind of horror film: in many ways it is an intensely creepy psychological-thriller with intense horror moments thrown in. The movie too is very typically European in its execution: a leisurely pace in the story telling, very controlled camera movement and the insightful framing of shots.

It is Summer and in an isolated and beautiful house in the countryside, between woods and corn fields, live nine-year-old twin brothers, Elias (Elias Schwarz) and Lukas (Lukas Schwarz). The twins are inseparable; they are very enigmatic; they keep large bugs as pets. They live with their mother (Susanne Wuest) who has recently returned home from apparent cosmetic surgery and her face is heavily bandaged. However, as far as the boys are concerned, nothing is like it was before she went away. They quickly begin to seriously doubt that this woman is actually their mother. And ... so begins their weird quest to find out the truth, a quest that involves the bizarre, the creepy and eventually the truly horrifying!

The tone, style and atmosphere of the piece blend cohesively to create feelings of unease and creepiness from the first frame to the last. Lacking any background soundtrack for most the film and any real over-the-top scares, it still has quite a few very disturbing moments especially in the last ten minutes or so.

The acting, from which is mostly an ensemble cast of three, is uniformly sound, particularly from the boys as there emotions are so frequently communicated via facial expressions and gestures rather than words.

And ... is there a twist? Of course there is! Unfortunately for me, I worked out what would eventually be revealed in the first ten minutes or so. That is not to say that I am ultra- perceptive; it's just that another early 70's film (one of my all time faves actually) used precisely the same premise so I had a "heads up" so to speak. I do admit that the film was spoiled for me because of this, but I still enjoyed it immensely! When the twist is revealed, however, it clearly shows that the film (despite its harrowing complexities) is really only about one thing ... and that one thing is very sad indeed!

Goodnight Mommy is pure Art-house horror as far as I am concerned because of the way the story is told and the cinematic techniques employed to showcase it. For example directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz have "done a Kubrick" in the final shot: it is far too long, it breaks all the cinematic rules, it makes no sense and then (in the hands of competent direction) it makes complete sense!

Goodnight Mommy is for the discerning horror movie lover who doesn't want everything dished up on a plate and who wants an intense psychological "journey" with a plausible payoff at the end.

I ended up liking this movie more than I thought I was going to from what I was feeling about halfway through.

It started off as a spooky/creepy horror/thriller, then not a whole lot happened... then moved into body horror. If they had shaved off about 20 minutes of what was, to me, kinda superfluous filler... I think this would have been much more successful. I get building tension and being atmospheric however there were times it dragged a bit.

It was shot beautifully and the acting was good all around. The "twist" was so obvious from about ten minutes in that I feel like it must have been purposeful (?) and almost the director/writers basically saying "that's not the point", or that's what I hope at least because a twist it was not.

This is a really cool concept to take and do a full blown horror with. This almost felt a bit like "introductory horror". Regardless I still think it was successful for what it was and I would recommend as long as you are patient with slow burns.

I went into Goodnight Mommy without knowing anything about this movie except that it's around 100-minutes long and that I had 100 minutes to spare. And it ended up being a very decent and enjoyable movie.

Co-directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, Goodnight Mommy follows a very horror-esque approach to match its growingly eerie tone. The movie tells the story of a pair of twin brothers who suspect their mother who just underwent a face-altering Costmetic surgery, of being a doppleganger. With incidents that end up making the boys grow more and more suspicious, they eventually default to having no other choice but to protest their mother through growingly violent means.

The success of Goodnight Mommy is that it's written in a way that makes you sympathetic to why the boys feel and react the way they do, even though you know it's the adult who's in the right. You feel like the violence against her is justified and then you realize that from an objective point of view, there's no reason for us to be rooting for the twins.

It's enjoyable in a very engaging way, and even the twist ending (yes, it's a twist ending movie) landed effectively. The movie, from a technical standpoint, is beautiful... with the overall imagery and the isolating production design adding to the charm of the movie. There's nothing too brilliant about it, but there's nothing to compain about either. It was a decent way to spend the 100 minutes I had without any regrets.

Twin boys move to a new home with their mother after she has face changing cosmetic surgery, but under her bandages is someone the children don't recognize.

If you enter in to this film after seeing the trailer, you might be disappointed or at least mislead. Whoever edited that thing make the music scarier, the action more intense, and that is just simply not what the film is about.

Instead, we get a slow burn that is on some levels a horror film, but on other levels a sad story that has far too much grounding in reality. The true scariness of the film is not the mask, as you might think from the trailer, but rather the interactions of a family that is unable to completely build trust.

And one of the most depressing. Just like last year's the Babadook, it's interested in a lot of the same themes, But, unlike The Babadook, it's also so hard to watch that it stops being very exciting or entertaining. It really puts back the meaning in "horror", for better or worse. It's so not a fun time in any way shape or form, and I think at the end of the day that really does differ it to many other horror films. But it also makes it much harder to rate as a whole. It's so incredibly bleak and there's no stylization of any kind. I don't get the criticisms of the twist being obvious though... it IS obvious, but I thought that was the point. I kind of saw it more like the film giving so many clues throughout the film so we could come up with what was going on and see and perceive the film in a different level. I don't see the mother mentioning it explicitly at the end as some sort of "AHA! Got you" moment at all. I mean, anyone who's paying attention to the film would've deduced that far before the ending. Fun? No. Effective? Yes, almost devastatingly so.