Sunday, October 24, 2021

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 24: Goodnight Mommy

2014.

I greatly regret watching Goodnight Mommy. Directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have defeated me. I lose tonight. I made it about an hour and twenty minutes deep into Goodnight Mommy before I had to start fast-forwarding through scenes. I could not keep watching this, I physically could not handle what was happening on the screen. I feel a bit sick even making myself write this review and think about this movie again.

Horror is a dare we play on ourselves. It can be aesthetically pleasing as artform, but it also relies on fear. Fear is typically something people do not want to feel, we've committed horrendous crimes in our history to not be afraid. But we still love to play horror. We build massive contraptions in theme parks to generate thrills. We have this entire genre here to make our spines chill and our heighten our emotions – but always in a controlled way. A girl might scream watching Paranormal Activity, but that's still play, she's having fun with fear.

I did not have fun with Goodnight Mommy. Not a surprise, it is not a fun movie. But it is much more than "not fun". It is a horrible thing I could only recommend to people with far thicker skins than me. I pushed as far as I’m willing to go and found my limit. It’s this, I don’t want to be here. For a moment watching Goodnight Mommy, I regretted this entire project. If horror is a game, again, I have lost.

This is mostly on me, I imagine. I know what I want out of horror movies and so I’ve avoided the most extreme cinema for this spooky series. Every year I consider things like Irreversible or Trouble Every Day or total exploitation trash like The Human Centipede, and I always changed my mind. I don’t think I’ll ever cover any of those. When I picked Goodnight Mommy, I believed it was just an artsy psychological horror film set in a haunted house. This movie has been compared to A Tale of Two Sisters, a Korean horror movie I greatly enjoyed last year. Maybe somebody should have warned me how violent this was, how fucking painful, how emotionally exhausting. Nobody said this was the Austrian answer to the New French Extreme movement. 

Also, I could have turned the movie off and watched some other 2014 movie, so again, on me. It would be a lot more fun to be discussing Annabelle. Nobody made me do this.

Goodnight Mommy opens with a clip of the von Trapp Family, the ones who inspired The Sound of Music, singing a happy German tune. This is cruel irony, nothing about this movie is happy. It is still Austrian though.

There are three principal players in Goodnight Mommy. There are the twins Elias and Lukas (played by Elias and Lukas Schwartz) and their unnamed Mother (Susanne Wuest). One day Elias and Lukas are out playing in the picturesque countryside when they come home to find their Mother’s face covered in bandages. From here, they are certain this is not their Mother, it is some creature in her guise. The Mother while sleeping is fed a cockroach to test her humanity, and she swallows it without notice. She does not remember any of their favorite moments or favorite songs. She will not even acknowledge Lukas’ presence at all. (If you’ve seen A Tale of Two Sisters, you probably will guess the twist. But please keep quiet for everybody else in the room.)

The first hour of Goodnight Mommy is a very slow but very creepy and intense examination of this family breaking apart. The Mother’s face covered in bandages is a terrifying image. There are scenes of ambiguous reality, of her wandering off, stripping naked, and her head shaking like a demon from Jacob’s Ladder. Elias and Lukas are too close even for twin brothers. No two people should be this attached. There’s something deeply wrong in their Grand Designs ultra-modern house. This all could work as horror story on this level.

Then the last act happens, which is just a continuous sequence of awful, awful torture and violence and pain. I am sure there are more extreme and more violent movies. But I cannot watch much torture, especially shit happening to teeth, no. The fact this madness is descending on a Mother and small children makes it all the more repulsive to me. I can’t do it. I’m out. Sorry. This is cruel to a level I simply cannot take. It's an effective emotional tragedy that lingers beyond simply visceral pain. But uch.

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala released a movie last year called The Lodge. It is the same kind of dynamic of a mother figure at battle with children who mistrust them, isolated from the world. But as shocking as that film is (and it is shocking, it opens with a suicide scene so sudden I burst into tears in the theater), it is nothing compared to Goodnight Mommy. As rough as that was, it was still a kind of play I could enjoy. The Lodge might as well be a Goosebumps book compared to Goodnight Mommy.

Is Goodnight Mommy bad art for being this intense and this extreme? I don’t know. I can’t say I know anybody I would recommend this to. It definitely is not for me. All I know is that for tomorrow’s movie, we’re switching gears. We're doing a simple monster movie. I need to learn to enjoy horror movies again.

Next Time we travel to 2015, the year of watching me Whip, watching me Nae Nae, grown men weeping openly at the end of Furious 7, and our next movie, Howl.

No comments:

Post a Comment