4 out of 5

Directed by: Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala

Yeesh, I’m still itching after watching this.  I should be careful saying this, but any film that causes me to utter something out loud while I’m watching it has achieved something, whether it’s being so bad as to elicit derision or so effective that I can’t help but utter an appropriate variation of “get out of the house!”  Goodnight Mommy is the latter.  I covered my eyes; I asked the character what they were doing as though pleading for the palpable tension to just be resolved…  Which brings up a valid point about genre: that there are bickerings over calling this horror, and my response is a shrug.  I think there’s an extremity here that will appeal to fans of that genre, but no, it’s not exactly a slasher flick or a movie about an exorcism.  It’s a narrative built around unnerving the viewer, and that can get pretty damned grisly (…as I start to itch again), but blood-hounds might get impatient waiting through the movie’s hour plus of minimal dialogue to get to that point, and then look at each other with “That’s It?” disbelief and go post on boards about how the movie’s unscary as fuck.  Such is the problem with the hype train, which might also cause one to go hunting for a twist early on and pluck it from one of several options, then run around the theater chortling at people like my covering our eyes.

Look: I’m a seasoned horror vet.  Which is why, beyond hearing that I should check a movie out, I try to avoid reading anything about it prior to a viewing.  Expectations are tough to completely ditch, but if you can wait to read this until after viewing the movie… the only warning I’d offer up front is that you do have to have some tolerance for blood.  But otherwise, proceed, not labeling this as horror, or thriller, or what have you until you’re done.

Because the blood doesn’t matter.  The ‘twist’ doesn’t matter.  Elias and Lukas are playing outside of their secluded home when a car drives up; they run to the door, eager to greet their mother, whom we understand to have been away for a bit.  But her face is swathed in bandages, and the visible flesh is bruised.  This is not the mother they recall, and they hesitate to embrace her.  The coldness of the reunion extends into the evening, and then mother seems to return the favor, instating strict new rules in the house and forbidding talking.  She locks the boys in their room.  She can’t seem to recall key information about them, or about herself, even.  Is this… is this even their mother?  And thus the unease grows, the boys finding more evidence – circumstantial, we know it is, but we’re locked into their point of view – suggesting she’s not mom after all, requiring the ante of “testing” her to be upped.  But the skill of directors / writers Franz and Fiala is as I mentioned: the way it plays out doesn’t exactly matter so much as the feelings of isolation and abandonment that are presented, and “forced” into the children’s role as we are, there’s also this horror of alienation from a source of comfort we may take for granted…

The pendulum swings back and forth between reason and naivety.  We can’t help but be swayed, up through those horrible moments that, due to the way they’ve been built up to with the push and pull of the narrative – if one gives themselves into that – can cause even an old gore cynic like myself to cry out.  I would’ve loved to have had that feeling elicited in the theater, surrounded by some audience members surely feeling the same.

The value of the construction can be recognized in that the film would still be effective even knowing the conclusion up front, just as Sixth Sense still has a good emotional core outside of its clue-sniffing setup.  The only thing that might change is that we might not get so ratcheted to the children’s point of view – we’ll have the “experience” of adult eyes on a second viewing – and this absolutely would change the exact dynamic of the tension.  But I imagine it would only cause us to then watch it from the other side of the emotional puzzle, and get a whole different sense of terror as a result.  Yeesh.  (Itching again.)

Anyhow, besides the question of how / why the children were left alone during their mum’s surgery, there is one giant flaw with the flick: that it does have to conclude.  Which is why I highlight how that conclusion isn’t really the point of the movie, but it has to conclude nonetheless, and there’s just no good way out.  Either the kids are right, or they’re wrong, or the movie leaves it open, and in all of those cases, the explanation (or lack of it) is inevitably going to be a letdown.  Not because the explanation itself doesn’t work, but just because it means that, one way or the other, our journey could be resolved with this knowledge.  Such is the cruel trick of a thriller of this type, though, and this particular plot, tying so directly into a relate-able set of fears, makes that inevitably more apparent.