Lukas (Lukas Schwarz) and Elias (Elias Schwarz) are a pair of young twin brothers who play in a cornfield one Summer, hide and seek is their game of choice and when one finds the other mock fighting ensues. Then they go down to the lake near the country house they live in with their mother (Susanne Wuest) and float on its surface, or at least one of them does, and finally return home to find their mother has returned and is sporting a face full of bandages. She has had cosmetic surgery that necessitates the bandages as part of the healing process, but she has come back from the hospital changed in other ways too, so different in fact that the boys are now sceptical this is their mother at all...
The idea that your mother has been replaced by an imposter, worse still one who cares a lot less about you than she did, is common childhood nightmare material, and formed the basis for this curio from Austria, originally named Ich seh ich seh. It was the first fiction feature directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz who had collaborated on a documentary before making this, which garnered them some international attention when it was picked up for distribution for many an arthouse circuit, only fitting when it was a horror movie in art movie guise. Since it was identified in the chiller genre, many approached it in that frame of mind, regarding it as a simple psychological thriller with a twist, but that could be a mistake.
This was down to the twist, if that's what it was, being revealed early, and when it came to the end of the film where it appeared to be wrapping itself up, there were still threads left hanging that would not be explained away in any tidy solutions. It seemed to be a well-worn yarn of creepy kids, but then again it equally could be a tale of an abusive parent, or maybe both simultaneously, given each side in this conflict could be guilty of bad behaviour, to put it mildly, but little about this added up on closer examination, which tended to have those disposed to analysing it regarding it as metaphorical or representational of... well, of something or other. It certainly seemed to be telling us something about how fatal a lack of trust can be.
Whether that was literal or figurative was very much in the eye of the beholder, but even if you did not feel bothered enough to delve into its deeper implications, this was an uneasy and often surreal experience, and that was before it turned into a tribute to the notorious cult horror novel of the nineteen-seventies, Let's Go Play at the Adams' by one hit wonder Mendal Johnson. Until that point of torture, the boys were feeling victimised by this woman who did not come across as having their best interests at heart, indeed she grows quite tyrannical in places when they fail to do her bidding. We were drip fed little details of what was going on, which would give the appearance of a conventional set of suspense movie circumstances when it was actually nothing of the sort, since putting those details together failed to construct a plot that wholly made sense.
It was like looking at a painting or photograph that may have the semblance of reality, yet every so often you would notice something that stuck out as not belonging to this image in any reasonable manner, and you could ignore these to take Goodnight Mommy as a straightforward horror story building to a ghastly climax, or you could appreciate the richer experience of a mindfuck when there may have been dream (or nightmare) sequences, yet the further this progressed the more difficult they were to discern. If this was a musing on the breakdown of trust within that family unit (the boys' father is never seen, and the mother has no partner we can see) then how effective it was could be debatable since it was so far removed from any conventional reality, yet as it posited this extreme set of circumstances with the boys (who share the same personality, more or less) monomaniacally fixated on the idea this woman is not their mother, you could understand why this bedrock in their lives crumbling to dust could have sent them round the bend. Yet there remained elements which surely had a point to make, but never added up, unless the point was to bastardise the bond between mother and child, which was unsettling enough as it was. Music by Olga Neuwirth.
