Home is an unhappy place for Lukas and Elias, who suspect their mother is not who she says she is.
If there’s anything more unsettling than creepy kids in a horror movie, it’s creepy kids in a horror movie...who sing. That much is made clear near the end of Goodnight Mommy, a fascinating and rather nasty piece of work by the Austrian team of Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, who wrote and directed the film together. This isn’t really the kind of scary movie in which the monsters lurk in the shadows. Almost everything is drenched in sunlight. That might remind you of Stanley Kubrick’s horror freak-out The Shining, in which sunlight pours through the windows of the Overlook Hotel as shocking events unfold. What else might remind you of The Shining? The arty camera setups, for one thing. Oh, and also: those disturbing twins.
True, these twins don’t invite people to join them in hell the way the menacing Grady daughters do in The Shining. Lukas (Lukas Schwarz) and Elias (Elias Schwarz) are appealing kids, age 10 or so, and they pass the time as you’d expect. They run around in the woods. They play games and roughhouse. They collect bugs and snakes, and in one endearing scene, they crack each other up with a burping contest. They seem to be having a wonderful summer.
Except that home is an unhappy place. The boys’ mother (Susanne Wuest) appears to be recovering from a medical procedure, and her face is almost completely hidden by bandages. She needs rest, and she announces that there must be silence in the house. Nothing can be brought inside. The blinds must be kept closed. She sternly sets down these rules, and she completely ignores Lukas with what appears to be great cruelty. It’s not clear what he has done to deserve this treatment. “You should apologize,” Elias tells him.
If you like nonstop mayhem in your horror flicks, Goodnight Mommy might initially seem draggy. There’s a teasing quality to the way Fiala and Franz develop their terrifying story, and they don’t always make clear what’s real and what isn’t. Some scary images seem to emerge from the boys’ imaginations. In one case, the twins explore a cave, as young boys will do. They find a cat and name it Leo. It will be the perfect addition to their menagerie. They don’t seem to notice or care that they are surrounded by human bones and skulls. As with other more dramatic and disgusting effects in the film, we only glimpse the remains, which makes their impact all the more powerful.
The plot hinges on the boys’ suspicions. They claim — loudly — that their mother is not who she says she is, and this could just be typical kid behavior. (I was reminded of when I was a lad and demanded proof from my parents that I wasn’t a foundling.) The twins’ uncertainty is partly because of Mom’s bandages, which evoke imagery from horror-cinema classics like Eyes Without a Face and the 1933 Invisible Man. Even after the bandages come off, Lukas and Elias have their doubts, and they devise a way to get a good, close, uninterrupted look at the woman’s face. I won’t say much more about this, but I will note the grand horror tradition of rotten kids being really mean, in films like The Omen and The Bad Seed. I thought of that tradition as I watched the final scenes of Goodnight Mommy.