Good­night Mommy

Try as we might, we’ll nev­er tru­ly know who our par­ents are. This amaz­ing, dis­may­ing film by Sev­erin Fiala and Veroni­ka Franz plays a child’s need for a nur­tur­ing par­ent against a mother’s abil­i­ty relate to, and empathise with, her offspring.

But what if these two impuls­es don’t quite meet in the mid­dle? Iden­ti­cal twins Lukas and Elias (played by Lukas and Elias Schwarz) have the run of the coun­try­side, pranc­ing, swim­ming, play­ing, explor­ing – doing all the things that inquis­i­tive pre-teen boys do. Then their moth­er returns home (a far-flung mod­ernist stack which looks bare­ly lived-in) with ban­dages cov­er­ing her face.

The fun and free­dom are over, and a life of sedate con­tem­pla­tion begins as mother’s wounds heal. When the boys try to make their own enter­tain­ment, moth­er becomes unrea­son­ably abu­sive towards them. She slaps them, insults them and pun­ish­es them, some­times even film­ing it on her smart phone. Then the boys start to believe that this woman, who doesn’t seem to have any knowl­edge of their rela­tion­ship pri­or to this ​“acci­dent”, might not be who she says she is.

Styl­is­ti­cal­ly and the­mat­i­cal­ly, this Aus­tri­an chiller is very much of a piece with the work of coun­try­men Michael Haneke, Jes­si­ca Haus­ner and Ulrich Sei­dl (the lat­ter has a sto­ry and pro­duc­tion cred­it here). Cold, clin­i­cal and shot with steely geo­met­ric pre­ci­sion, Fiala and Franz’s film is also like the ulti­mate homage to Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing, right down to the way the direc­tors com­mu­ni­cate an eerie sense of geog­ra­phy, plac­ing the view­er inside this night­mare house along with the fren­zied characters.

And while the cen­tral mys­tery keeps the view­er tight­ly locked into the dra­ma, you’re nev­er entire­ly con­vinced that this is a clear-cut case of evil moth­er ver­sus angel­ic kids. It’s a belt­ing hor­ror film to kick off 2016, and it’s one whose imag­i­na­tive scenes of extreme vio­lence are absolute­ly not for the squeamish.