Perhaps the highest accolade afforded to the Austrian horror movie Goodnight Mommy is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not choose it as a contender for the best foreign film category because, really, in this year of lamentable choices by the Academy’s outmoded membership, who wants to be associated with them at all?
That being said, the virtues of Goodnight Mommy are impossible to doubt. Whether or not we are living, as some critics claim, in the middle of a new golden age for horror, this is an honourably creepy, gruesome and terrifying entry in a genre that has recently offered us such worthy screamers as It Follows and The Babadook. Directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, Goodnight Mommy was produced by Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl, and to some degree it shares the same baleful, unblinking and unnerving gaze that characterised his wonderfully uncomfortable Paradise trilogy.
Twin boys Elias and Lukas lead an idyllic childhood in their parents’ holiday chalet in the Alps, swimming in their lake, holding belching contests, being kids. Then their mother, injured in a car crash, returns from hospital, her face swathed in bandages and her nature so transformed that the boys wonder if she is actually an imposter who has taken their mother’s place. Certainly she is a great deal more overbearing than the woman they remember, treating them with arbitrary cruelty, locking them in their bedroom at night and keeping the house in darkness all day.
The mystery itself is perplexing and unsettling. What reinforces the escalating terror is the crisply cold camerawork and consciously sterile production design. Long, deadpan shots take in a bourgeois dwelling filled with pine furniture, life-size, Gerhard Richter-ish photos of out-of-focus women and total-blackout blinds. Amid all this cleanliness, surely there must soon enough be bloodshed.
And there is, but whose blood? Suffice it to say, the film is expert at misdirection and manipulation, two of the most pleasurable qualities of any good horror movie. The tyranny of the mother seemingly gives way to a much more upsetting tyranny of the children but, by this time, we are so wedded to the perspective of the two boys that it is hard to fight one’s way back to a healthy sense of certainty about anything.
This trick of perspective is key to the movie’s success. (Exactly who is it, for instance, who sees the mother pulling grotesque Francis Bacon-style faces in the forest at night?) Some might glimpse what’s really going on as early as the first act, but it subtracts nothing from the film’s success in creeping us out. You will never wish to see a cockroach ever again, or a cat, or a bloodshot eyeball, or superglue, but you will know you have been effectively terrified – and what else matters, really, in a good horror movie?
