By: Declan Hertel Entertainment Editor
I’m going to start right off the bat by saying I am going to try really hard to not spoil anything about “Goodnight Mommy,” a fantastic piece of psychological horror out of Austria.
Please, do not look up anything about this movie before seeing it. Here is all you need to know: the mother of twin boys comes home with a bandaged face and distant demeanor after an operation, and the boys develop doubts over if she really is their mother.
It is really, really good and you should seek it out as soon as possible.
There’s no obvious place to start talking about the movie, so I guess I’ll start with the fact that it is supremely unsettling. I’d be hard pressed to think of a movie I felt more physically uncomfortable watching.
As the film rolled on down the tracks with near-perfect pacing, I was squirming more and more. There is nothing rushed during “Goodnight Mommy” (“Ich Seh Ich Seh,” or “I See I See” in the original German); every moment is long and slow and savage in its stark delivery, and I was unable to look away.
Directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz use lighting masterfully throughout “Goodnight Mommy,” as evidenced by the film’s tone growing darker as the images on the screen grow lighter, a reversal of the normal strategy in horror.
Just as good is the usage of sound: the movie contains little dialogue and is mostly scored by ambient noise, but the heavy silence is occasionally punctuated by low rumblings and spikes in volume that are as unnerving as anything I’ve seen in a movie.
Child actors in horror movies are near-universally reviled, so I was very glad to see that Lukas and Elias Schwarz, as the twins, deliver excellent, wonderfully restrained performances. Susanne Wuest also turns in a spectacular performance as their mother (or is she?). The interplay between Wuest and the Schwarz boys is impeccable.
I wish I could say more than that, but anything beyond “they’re just so great” would ruin a great deal of the film.
One final note: yes, it is a foreign film and all the actors speak German. That said, there is very little dialogue in the movie, so subtitles are minimal, and it’s a really great movie. If you can handle a small amount of reading over the course of a tight, tense 100 minutes (which you can), you really ought to expose yourself to the magic of foreign cinema. But if subtitles truly are enough to keep you from enjoying a really great movie, there’s no hope for you anyway.
A great piece of psychological horror seems rare in this time of “Paranormal Activity” and its knockoffs saturating the horror market, but in “Goodnight Mommy,” we find a slice of salvation.
It’s disturbing in a big way, and will stick with you for a long time after the credits roll. Seek it out and spend an evening in glorious terror.
4 out of 4 Paws
