Goodnight Mommy AKA Ich seh ich seh
(2014) 99 Min.
Rated: R (Fairly Gory)
Country: Austria
Director: Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz
Stars: Lukas Schwarz, Elias Schwarz, Susanne Wuest
Links: IMDB | Wikipedia
Rating: ★★★★☆
Twin brothers are not sure their mother is the same person anymore.
Synopsis:
Lukas and Elias are 10 year old twin brothers who live in a large modern house in the remote countryside of Austria. They spend their days playing in fields and swimming.
One day their mother is home, her face wrapped in white bandages. Only her eyes and mouth are visible. This frightens the twins a little. What’s more is she is behaving oddly. She closes all the window shades and she seems says she will stop playing along and serving two meals. She pointedly ignores Lukas.
Mother demands that the boys knock before entering a room and be quiet. She hits Elias when she finds a lighter in his room.
The brothers find an injured cat in a catacomb and try to nurse it back to health secretly. Later on the find the cat dead in the basement. They suspect it was Mother. They look through old photo albums with missing photos and even try to search on the internet for any clues.
After the boys put the dead cat in a tank filled with fluid, Mother comes in and finds it. She screams at the twins and Elias asks where their real mother is. She takes him to his bedroom and forces him to say she’s his real mother. She locks the brothers in the bedroom for a time.
During this time the brothers decide she is not their mother. Mother returns and says she is not mad at them. She offers them a toy, but instead the brothers run away to the nearby town. They run into a church but the priest takes them right back to their home.
Mother takes some pills and falls asleep. She wakes up tied down to the bed. The twins ask her where their mother is, but she continues to claim she is their mother. They cover her mouth with tape.
A pair of Red Cross people come to the house to look for donations. The boys give the volunteers money out of their mom’s purse. Just as the people are leaving, Mother is able to get the tape off her mouth and tries to scream for help. She is unheard.
The boys glue her mouth shut. Later they realize she can’t eat and cut open her mouth. She has wet the bed by this point. The boys untie her to allow her to change the bed, however she throws the sheets on them and tries to escape. She trips on a wire the boys set up and she knocks herself unconscious.
She wakes up glued to the floor of the living room. None of her answers are satisfactory for the boys. Elias asks what Lukas is doing right now. She says she can’t see Lukas. She tells Elias she’s sorry and that it’s not his fault Lukas died in the accident. Elias sets the curtains on fire. The whole room quickly starts to burn and Elias and Lukas run out as Mother gets engulfed in flames and burns to death.
Elias is walking through a corn field. Soon he meets up with Lukas and his mother. The trio embrace and are happy together.
Review:
Goodnight Mommy is a psychological thriller with bits of horror and gore thrown in. The majority of the film is slow paced and quiet. You have to piece together the events because the past just isn’t spoken about openly. This makes the film ambiguous and therefore more interesting.
This film has multiple interpretations to it. If you have the patience for it and the stomach for some of the torture scenes in the last act, it’s really quite a good film. Is Elias crazy or has the mother been replaced? Even though you think you know the answer there will always be a few seeds of doubt.
This film illustrates the cruelty of a child and the coldness of a parent on the verge of a mental breakdown. It’s just such a volatile environment and it’s a film that can only get better with repeat viewings.