Review of Goodnight Mommy (2015) by Mikael K — 10 Feb 2016

Horror films and thrillers rarely emerge as my very favorite pieces of cinema, as they tend to be so concentrated on scaring or thrilling that there's no room left for deeper layers of story. There are major individual exceptions to this of course- I rank David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" as my second favorite film ever-, and Austrian import "Goodnight Mommy" is one of those. It's in fact one of the very best films I saw in 2015; unique, memorable and powerful. In it fellow Austrian director Haneke seems to meet aforementioned Lynch as well as Stanley Kubrik.

Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz's masterpiece of a debut is about young identical twin boys Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz) who live with their celebrity mother in the idyllic Austrian Countryside. In the beginning we see the boys alone together, enjoying their surroundings. The setting is beautiful: a spacious, white functional house next to a lake and a forest. But from the very start there is a sense of unease to everything.

We find out that the boys' mother has been away and now comes back after a plastic surgery operation, her face completely bandaged, unrecognizable. She also acts differently. The mother the boys remember as kind and caring is cold, distant and ill-tempered. She is quick to raise her voice, especially whenever the boys are doing anything together, obviously eager to get between them through favoring manipulation. A chilling thought solidifies into certainty: "She is not mother.".

What makes "Goodnight Mommy" so strong is that it's a thriller of the most psychologically resonant kind. There are no scares or adrenaline highs, just an ever-intensifying, almost unbearable sense of something being wrong, a deep, subconsciously felt threat from somewhere. What could be scarier than what an only parent who is turning against you would be to a child? Watching the film, the fear becomes as real as only a child's fear can usually be. But the sense of dread is also elegant, beautiful and seductively melancholic. You wish to close your eyes and devour what you see at the same time.

Susanne Wuest is perfect as the masked mother, nuanced and utterly horrifying. The twins are also completely relatable. Martin Gschlacht's cinematography is beautifully composed and haunting. The light of the spacious white house reads as claustrophobic darkness in the long, mercilessly slow takes. Disturbing pieces of art are almost always somewhere in the shot. The set is perhaps the most important character of the film, á la Kubrick's "The Shining".

By the time we reach the absolutely devastating ending, it feels as if you've been awakened from a nightmare you wished would never end.