Reviewed by Daniel Kurland (@DanielKurlansky)

What a brilliant premise, Austrian writer/directors, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, have come up with here. Lukas and Elias (Lukas and Elias Schwarz), twin nine year-olds, are awaiting the return of their mother, who has just underdone some sort of facial surgery. When the mother (Susanne Wuest) returns, face heavily bandaged, the two children begin to question their mother’s erratic behavior and wonder if it’s really her who came back. Beautiful. I love it. It’s an incredibly economical, simplistic story, but one that connects and gets under our skin simply because it is so universal.

Goodnight Mommy is certainly an unflinching, bewildering experience, but also one of the better examples of a film completely throwing me off base where I couldn’t have been more wrong about where everything was heading. I’m not going to spoil exactly where the film ends up going, but you’ll soon find yourself being more concerned for the mother’s safety than Lukas or Elias’. There’s a reason that this sort of power dynamic structure has been getting played with for decades now, whether it’s in The Bad Seed, Children of the Corn, The Omen, or A Tale of Two Sisters (which Goodnight Mommy bears the closest resemblance to, with both of them still diverging in very different directions).

This all feels intentional though, with you being thrown around perspective-wise, trying to navigate around who you should be rooting for here. It’s a great experience that benefits from its unraveling nature. You get just as tangled up in it as everyone in the film does, and that overwhelmed, rudderless feeling it casts over you arguably strengthens what the film is already doing so well.

Much to its credit, it’s also certainly a smart movie, where it fully thinks through the concept, approaching it from most angles, with characters acting how someone should rather than acquiescing to the mechanics of a movie. You might not be overly frightened by it in the end, but you can’t argue that it isn’t well thought out and executed for the most part.

Certainly one of Goodnight Mommy’s downfalls is that it turns in legitimate scares in favor of a creeping feeling of dread and being uncomfortable that mounts through the picture. It might not be as flashy as some of the angles that could have been taken here, but the mood that’s established is the lifeblood for psychological thrillers, which this film much more plays into. That being said, it does service its horror indulgences with some select sequences (usually in dreams) that hint at a scarier film hiding inside here.

The atmosphere that Franz and Fiala build only adds to the disorienting feeling of the whiplash from all of the turns that the film keeps taking. There are even a bunch of weird things in the movie that are there just to irk you, get under your skin, and make this universe seem off-kilter and “broken,” just like how Lukas and Elias now feel with this not-mother walking around in their home. Moments like their excursion on the trembling, uneven ground, the grave they stumble upon, their masks that they often turn to, and of course, the cockroaches, all perfectly creep you out while causing you to bring your guard up accordingly, too.

While I suppose you could say that there’s a larger mystery to unlock here, it works all the better due to the fact that all of the pieces are there from the start but you just don’t know what you should be looking for. It’s the perfect example of a film that you immediately want to watch again after finishing it in order to pick up on all of the touches and hints scattered throughout it.

The film ends up becoming a pretty interesting meditation on the idea of trust, and how skewing or perverting it can become the most powerful weapon in your arsenal. Constantly this notion is being toyed with, not only between how Lukas and Elias view their mother and how she views them, but also the audience’s collective trust of filmmakers Franz and Fiala, as visual tricks and the composition of scenes slowly chip away and distort our perception of things until we’re not sure what’s true either.

Another kind of beautiful thing that the film does is that it acts as this grounded, realistic tragedy that’s steeped through horror and the supernatural, using them as a coping device and defense mechanism for the children. Sometimes the absurd can be easier to deal with than the truth, after all, and it’s another welcome dimension to a film that attempts to say a lot, but still ultimately falls a little short.

More than anything, you’re really kind of empathizing with the mother and hoping she’ll be okay as the film is pushed to the line of torture porn but not exactly crossing it. Again, the direction the film goes is certainly not the one I expected (or the direction that the trailer conveys, if you’ve seen it—and God, it’s one of the scariest trailers out there but it’s not this movie), and it’s hard to say if it’s exactly the best take and direction for the film to adopt. Nevertheless, it doubles down on it completely, never wavering in what it’s trying to say, and if nothing else there is always a strong voice present here in directors, Franz and Fiala.

Goodnight Mommy certainly works more than it doesn’t, and it’s full of very powerful visuals, and some great performances out of the minimalistic cast. There’s no doubt a promising future from Franz and Fiala, and I definitely look forward to their next film. This one goes out on a truly hauntingly chilling final image, but in the end the picture maybe should have gone against its instincts a little more, allowing itself to access a deeper well of horror. Goodnight Mommy still presents a deep, satisfying story, it’s just not the scariest one.

Regardless, I’m never going to look at super glue the same again…

Goodnight Mommy begins playing in select theaters, September 11th.