[yasr_overall_rating]
Twin boys move to a new home with their mother after she has face changing cosmetic surgery, but under her bandages is someone the children don’t recognize.
Maybe it is because “Goodnight Mommy” is an independent German horror film that it put me in the mindset of “Funny Games,” a truly horrific and mesmerizing tale about a gruesome home invasion. “Goodnight Mommy” has nothing to do with a home invasion but indeed, is horrific, gruesome, and mesmerizing.
If you’re a big fan of the horror genre, as am I, you know that they can be seriously flawed B movies, downright stupid F movies, or that rare gem that fills your movie experience with gasps of sheer revulsion as to what is to come. This is that movie…that rare gem.
This is basically a cast of three. A mother (Susanne Wuest) returns to the house in the countryside where she resides with her two young twin boys, Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz) Her face is heavily bandaged from a cosmetic operation and she is unrecognizable to the boys in both her looks and her actions. The boys struggle with the idea that this may not be their mother and their actions are bolstered as their doubts grow. The mother exhibits her own strange behavior and as the boys repeatedly question her, “Where is our mother?” I also was leery that something sinister was going on and the mother had been replaced.
The actors are tremendous. The boys have a sense of innocence yet it is not lost on the audience that there is an evil about them. The mother endures some terrifying and appalling acts from her sons as they try to get her to tell them the truth about their real mother.
When that “gotcha moment” happens, that’s when I realized that everything that had happened thus far was not what it had seemed. I am not one to watch a movie more than once (unless it is a true classic) but now that I know the ending, I want to watch “Goodnight Mommy” again and everything will make much more sense the second time around. Both the mother’s peculiar actions and the sons odd behavior is so clear to me now!
And this film had me thinking about it throughout the next day and the strange accident that happened. The cruel behavior of the boys could certainly rule out it being anything but an accident. There are some serious psychological issues going on in this movie and I loved it! This is a film that has a slow build up to a fantastically disturbing ending. This film is a must see for the any horror fan.
In select theaters now including the Angelika Film Center in Dallas
