Goodnight Mommy directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz is an Oscar-nominated Austrian horror film. After undergoing facial surgery, a mother (Susanne Wuest), returns home to her two sons (Lukas Schwarz and Elias Schwarz), her face completely covered in bandages. The twins soon begin to notice that nothing is like it was before, and begin to doubt that the woman is their real mother.
More than anything, I wanted to love this film. The long takes and slow exposition were perfect for establishing a tense mood, the costume/makeup design for the mother was unnerving, and Wuest’s performance was spot on. The dream sequences were surreal and terrifying and every detail of the house was interesting and slightly off – especially the large blurry photos. Additionally, the ending shot of the mother and her children staring into the camera for an uncomfortably long time will haunt me and inspire me for years to come.
So where did the film fail? It was a film that needed the plot twist to elicit certain feelings in the audience, but instead of using its twist to its advantage, the twist was clearly foreseeable and the film did nothing to play with audience perception. Perhaps the twist of Lukas’ death is something less foreseen by Austrian audiences, but for American horror fans, we have seen the twist many times before. Within five minutes of the opening scene, my movie companions (who are far less into horror than I) leaned over and whispered, “Lukas is dead”. Thus the magic that could have been present in the movie disappeared.
Now, not all films (this one included) need to have a monster or a fantastic element, but for this film to work and truly get under your skin, it needed to have uncertainty. While some moments do get close – such as the mother inspecting herself in front of the mirror, almost as though she is seeing herself for the first time – these moments are few and far between. We as the viewer never doubt that she is in fact the twins’ mother.
There is a lack of perspective and we are unable to ever see things from the point of view of Elias or Lukas. The audience has never seen how the mother treated the boys previously, there is never a moment of serious weirdness from the mother, and we have no context of her behavior towards other people (other than a one-sided phone call that only has her repeating what she earlier said to Elias about “not playing along anymore”). She even begins the film with playing a sweet guessing game with her son(s). This act of kindness immediately undermines the idea that she has been replaced by some horrible new person.
Additionally, the boys’ strange behavior is far more disturbing than anything the mother is implied to have done. Sure, she may have killed the cat (from the boys’ perspectives) but it is far weirder to then take the cat and display it in formaldehyde. It is hard to root for characters that are unrelatable.
The revelations of the photo of the mother and a similarly-dressed woman, and the video of their mother with brown eyes (when the twins corner their “mother”, her eyes are clearly blue), come far too late in the story and are given too little time for consideration or wonder. Within a couple minutes of discovery they are given answers – contact lenses and a friend – with no further discussion in the scope of the film.
This all comes to a head during the torture sequence. There is a difference between effective gore and the overuse of gore just for gore’s sake, a.k.a. “torture porn”. Unfortunately, in this case, since we knew from the beginning that the boy was mentally disturbed and the mother was just a poor woman at her wit’s end, the film turns from a constructive gore to torture porn; we are just seeing a poor woman mutilated and murdered.
Now, if the film had done a better job of creating uncertainty, something changes in the perception of the torture. It is just like the way that no one feels bad when zombies are hacked to pieces or the alien is ejected out into space and killed. There is a much greater horror impact if the audience was almost rooting for the kids in the sequence; if we as the viewer felt like the monster was getting her (gross) just desserts. Then comes the revelation: the fact that all our glee was unfounded – there was no monster, just a poor mother who loved her surviving son. The film was so well-suited for that punch in the gut, its lack was sorely noticeable.
Ultimately, it is a film worth seeing once, but it was not worth the price of a night out and popcorn. Its value lies in the inspiration of what could have been and the directors’ masterful creation of atmosphere. Perhaps an M. Night Shyamalan American remake would bring out the best of this concept.
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