‘Goodnight Mommy’ is a Deeply Unsettling Horror Film

What’s scarier than dealing with family? Horror films have always explored the dark recesses of family life; from The Bad Seed and The Shining, through to last year’s indie breakout hit The Babadook. The new Austrian film Goodnight Mommy – the English version of the film’s original title, Ich seh Ich seh – pushes the relationship between a mother and her children into harrowing extremes, creating an unflinching look at how tragedy and loss can tear apart the very fabric of one’s reality.

When the unnamed mother (Susanne Wuest) returns home from a surgery, her face obscured by bandages, her two children, Elias and Lukas (played by actors with the same names), realize something is off. She is snappy and short-tempered. She spends her days lying in bed with the blinds drawn, refusing any visitors. She has mysterious phone conversations, and lashes out violently at one of the young boys. As her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, Elias and Lukas begin to suspect that someone has taken the place of their mother, and begin spying on the suspected intruder in order to uncover who is actually beneath those bandages.

Goodnight Mommy is a slow-burner of a film, and the tranquil first half of the movie belies the total over-the-top horror of its latter half. Set almost entirely in the family’s gorgeous modern home, the tension slowly builds as Elias and Lukas push to learn the truth about their mother, before exploding into some of the most stomach-churning scenes in recent memory. Let’s just say you’ll never look at Superglue the same way again.

The central twist of the film is something that most viewers will have grasped onto early on, as the film’s directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala seem to have little interest in keeping it much of a secret. One predicatable twist aside, there is much in the film that is never resolved. A great deal of the family’s backstory is never revealed, and vital details are left unaddressed, leaving the audience to fill in many of the gaps on their own—a refreshing change of pace from the deluge of exposition that wraps up most horror films these days.

Thanks to powerful performances all around, especially by the two young actors, Goodnight Mommy allows the audience to live in the young boys’ heads, which only makes the eventual onslaught of violence that much more unsettling. If you can stomach the horror, you’ll find a heartbreaking look at a fractured family processing grief, which is scarier than any onscreen boogeyman.

Goodnight Mommy is in limited release now.