Hide-and-seek

Goodnight Mommy  by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala    ★★★

It's summer in Austria. The nine-year-old twin brothers Elias and Luke (played by the twins Elijah and Luke Schwarz) play tag in a cornfield. Both boys are wearing a similar homemade, primitive-looking mask: an ominous sign that this film deals with masked identity. The original German film title Ich Seh, Ich Seh refers to the guessing game I spy with my little eye, where things initially remain hidden.

When Elias and Lukas return to the secluded villa where they are spending their summer holidays, their mother (played by the Austrian actress Susanne Wuest) arrives. She has just been released from the hospital, where she underwent plastic surgery after a serious car crash. Her face is wrapped in medical gauze, making mommy look like a mummy. She also behaves much stricter and more detached than usual. Elias and Luke begin to doubt whether she's in fact their real mother...

Terror

Goodnight Mommy is the feature film directorial debut of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. They also wrote the screenplay of this compelling psychological horror thriller, in which nothing is what it seems. The film was produced by the renowned Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, who is married to Franz.

Franz and Fiala increase the suspense gradually, while the distrust of Elias and Lukas grows. The tense relationship between the stubborn boys and the woman who maintains that she is indeed their mother derails into a brutal confrontation, reminiscent of the chilling home invasion terror in Funny Games and the mysterious behavior of the children and adults in The White Ribbon, both movies by the controversial German director Michael Haneke.

Handsomely shot in a photogenic villa, Goodnight Mommy held my interest on a visual level. The denouement in the second part of the film, however, felt, although suprising and very sadistic, less suspenseful than the frightening, promising trailer suggests. This production had a lot of potential and should have delivered something even more gripping than the noteworthy, yet not entirely satisfying film I just saw. 

JN.

Goodnight Mommy - Austria - 2014.

Cast: Elias Shwarz, Luke Schwartz and Susanne Wuest.

Genre: psychological thriller / horror / family drama