Review: Goodnight Mommy

Goodnight Mommy (15)

Austria 2014  99 mins Subtitles Dir: Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz Starring: Susanne Wuest, Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz

A creepy and unsettling arthouse horror from Austrian directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, Goodnight Mommy has become something of a film festival favourite over the last year or so. That it’s stronger on atmosphere than plotting is probably just as well, because the film boasts a ‘twist’ that genre enthusiasts will anticipate within the first five minutes.

Twin ten-year-olds Elias and Lukas (played by real-life twins Elias and Lukas Schwarz) appear to live an idyllic life, romping in the lake, fields and, er, skull-filled catacomb adjoining their sleek, expensive, antiseptic, modernist family abode deep in the Austrian countryside. Except that there doesn’t appear to be much of a family apart from their TV presenter mum (Wuest), who shocks the siblings with her appearance when she returns home from hospital swathed in bandages that conceal much of her face. The nature and purpose of her surgery is something of a mystery, but the twins have a more urgent concern. They begin to suspect that this woman isn’t their mother at all, especially when she starts ignoring Lukas and imposes draconian new household rules. Naturally, they resolve to unmask the impostor and find out what she’s done with their real mom.

Co-writer/director Veronika Franz is the wife of Ulrich Siedl, with whom she collaborated on the likes of Dog Days and Import Export, and it’s not hard to detect a shared grisly artistic sensibility – nor to imagine the fun this well-matched couple must have dreaming up new scenarios of degradation and suffering together. Shot on 35mm in the same cold, unflinching style as Michael Haneke’s original Funny Games, to which it bears some comparison, Goodnight Mommy also caries echoes of other superior entries in the Menacing Kid genre, from The Children to We Need to Talk About Kevin. Indeed, the sly opening clip of those saccharine fellow Austrian Von Trapps gives notice that Fiala and Franz take a bracingly jaundiced view of the wholesome nuclear family, whose sanctity conservative mainstream horrors are generally eager to uphold.

If the bold attempt at misdirection never really comes off, there’s still plenty to savour here. Those who enjoy traditional horror tropes will welcome the mirror image shots that are mandatory in all twin flicks, plenty of refreshingly non-CGI creepy-crawlies, the unexpected arrival in the midst of the carnage – in this case an elderly pair of Red Cross chuggers – and the honouring of the old rule stating that no cute pet can ever be introduced without something ‘orrible happening to the unfortunate beast later on. Other cliches are skilfully dodged, notably the ubiquitous lazy crash’n’jolt soundtrack, which is eschewed in favour of a far more effective, mostly music-free unnerving sound design that enhances the three principals’ increasingly eccentric behaviour. Exposition is kept to a minimum too, with plenty of questions left unanswered as the directors concentrate on building an atmosphere of unease and mounting paranoia all the way to the torture porny climax that feels like Eli Roth unleashed in Dogtooth-land.