Easily the creepiest film I've seen at the festival so far this year, Goodnight Mommy is a disturbing familial tale from Austria that gets increasingly nasty.
The story starts with a grumpy mother arriving home from hospital with a heavily bandaged face, treating her twin sons with cold harshness. As her coldness only increases, the boys start to question whether she's actually their mother at all.
It's darkly intriguing from the get-go and slowly develops into something darkly horrifying by its end - the squeamish should not attend this one, some of its violence is fairly cringe-inducing.
But more effective than the violence is the tone, which is an unnerving, Haneke-esque chillingness.
Early on, it's made apparent that not everything we're seeing is real, but rather the troubling visions of the characters on-screen. Then as a few plot twists are revealed and the conflict ramps up, the blurring of reality and fantasy becomes terrifying and deadly.
This is the sort of film that is best to go into knowing as little as possible beforehand, a lot of its power residing in a psychological gutpunch delivered near its end. I'm not sure if it's due to just how shocking some what was going on was muting it or a lack of directorial flourish, but that narrative punch didn't land as hard as it should've for me.
Goodnight Mommy is perhaps not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but it's a very dark, twisted family thriller that worked nicely as a Sunday night horror.
Three-and-a-half stars.
Goodnight Mommy is playing at the 2015 New Zealand Film Festival.
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Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh, Ich seh):: Director: Veronika Franz:: Starring: Susanne Wuest, Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz, Hans Escher, Elfriede Schatz, Karl Purker, Georg Deliovsky, Christian Steindl:: Rating: R16 - Violence & horror:: Running Time: 99 minutes