User Reviews

Goodnight Mommy is a great example of how more can be done with far, far less than many movies attempt. Also known by its original title of Ich seh ich seh (German for I See I See), it was written and directed by Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala in both of their full-length feature film debuts. It perfectly demonstrates how the familiar can be much more terrifying than any outside monster could dream.

It opens with twins Elias and Lukas (played by Elias and Lukas Schwarz) playing outside while they await their mother's return from cosmetic facial surgery. Things are immediately awry as mom (played by Susanne Wuest) now acts very strangely — ordering them to keep the blinds closed and noise to a minimum to aid in her recovery, but also pointedly ignoring Lukas and lashing out at Elias when he misbehaves. The boys soon start to suspect that the woman under the bandages isn't their real mother…

** SPOILERS! **

They did an amazing job at even making some of the most benign scenes — the boys playing before their mother's return, for example — have this air of forlornness to them. Even before she arrives at home you feel this strong sense of loneliness from them, despite the fact that they are constantly together.

Every interaction between mother and sons manages to be either awkward, stiff, and fumbling or downright hostile — or sometimes both. If a scene isn't tough to watch because of actual disturbing images (which are surprisingly few and far between), it's tough because you're witnessing such a sterile, seemingly unfamiliar interaction between family. She treats them like unwanted strangers most of the time, despite their obvious pleas for affection.

As I mentioned, the truly disturbing images and scenes are few and far between — this movie relies more heavily on an implied, psychological type of horror — but the ones that do exist are intense. Even somewhat subtle ones, like when one of the boys tries to peek in on the mother while she's in the bathroom with her bandages off and she hears the creak of the door and we see her heavily bloodshot eye catch a glimpse of him in a magnifying mirror. Truly chilling. Or the mom standing in front of the full- length mirror with a sheer nightgown on — an image that, on its face, shouldn't be so disturbing but in the full context of the movie I thought it was brilliant. In another scene, they put a cockroach from their collection onto her face as she sleeps and watch it crawl into her mouth. In one, we see the mother from above, tied to the bed, having recently peed herself, and she's almost reminiscent of the crucifixion. In another, we only hear a torture scene from the boys' room, the shot centered around a walkie-talkie on the shelf.

There's some pretty heavy implications throughout of the mother being severely depressed. Some of the signs are written off as necessary parts of her recovery process, but I definitely got the impression that she was deeply sad — the shades are all drawn, absolute quiet is demanded, no visitors, ordering a year's worth of frozen pizzas, unexpected snaps of rage, and one scene in particular where she fakes being asleep when one of the twins tried to get her after the doorbell rang, or when she rushes to get her bandages back on upon the twins returning home after playing outside. We, of course, find out why later on, but I thought it was an interesting view on how isolating and confusing depression can be, both for the person suffering from it and those who are close to them.

There were so many great shots where they highlighted the twins' similarities while also making sure not to make them perfectly symmetrical — them laying with the dead cat, sitting against the tub bleeding from their noses, one of them kneeling at the cross while the other stands.

The tension is high throughout the whole film, but it really ramps up when they start seriously suspecting that their mother is not who she claims to be. Watching their paranoia grow was alarming as they start to train themselves to withstand beatings, carving weapons, and keeping guard one at a time. When they get to the point of actually tying her up and interrogating her, it's amazing how much you really don't know WHO you side with. There is evidence mounting on both sides — both of them being overly paranoid and of her actually being a fake somehow — that you just flip flop back and forth the entire time. It makes some of the torture scenes very confusing because, while hard to watch no matter what, there is part of you that feels for these boys — you can feel their loneliness, their betrayal, their deep sadness. And, ultimately, the twins are brilliantly written as they vacillate so quickly between cruelty and sympathy, sometimes even in the same action — they burn her face, but then put antiseptic on it, right before taping her mouth. They superglue her mouth shut (one of the most WTF moments of the whole film), but then cut it open to feed her, all the while begging her to please prove that she's their mom. It's desperate in a very raw way.

The ending, beginning with her escaping, is the perfect sort of crescendo of chaos. And the reveal — that Lukas died along with their father in an accident — was SHOCKING, truly. One of those truly great moments in a film where you say "ohhhhHHHH" and so many previous moments snap into place and make sense. It's an insane talent to be able to put a movie together with that much seamless complexity.

Overall, just awesome. Truly chilling, amazing mood all around, and incredible acting from everyone involved.

Goodnight Mommy (Ich Seh Ich Seh) follows two twin brothers, Elias and Lukas, and their mother who has just returned home after having a major surgery on her face. She has to wear bandages around her head because of this, but her sons begin to question whether or not she truly is their mother.

The premise alone is enough to get anyone hooked. It's a great idea, and it wouldn't be hard to make this movie unsettling considering the concept alone is scary. Despite this, it wasn't so much. It was always unsettling and subtle with it's horror, and treated itself more as a drama with an actual story that just so happens to also be extremely unnerving. In the case of this movie it works very well, though. It focuses largely on the story and characters, which is a much appreciated change in the horror genre.

Some people might consider the twist ending to be predictable, and I can see why, but I loved it. I didn't expect it at all.

Overall Goodnight Mommy (Ich Seh Ich Seh) is fantastic. It's got a great premise and presentation, with interesting characters and a fantastic twist ending. In the end I would definitely recommend this movie.

Well this movie caught me completely off-guard. I had no idea what to expect given that this is the very first feature film of Austrian director duo Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz. Goodnight Mommy is about two young twin boys who live in a countryside house with their actress mom, and spend most of their waking hours playing together. Their mother has just had surgery and her face is covered in bandages, rendering her unrecognizable to the twins. They become convinced that the woman who has returned from surgery is not their real mother...and I won't spoil the rest.

If you have any interest in cinema as an art form, Goodnight Mommy is an absolute must-see. It is the most beautifully shot film I've seen since Under the Skin. Each shot is framed in such a meticulous and perfectly orchestrated way that you could pause the film at any time and end up with a still worthy of hanging on your wall. I've never seen a director put Venetian blinds to such diverse and good use, especially the nighttime shots of them, it made natural movement look slithery and creepy.

The most haunting aspect of the incredible visuals was the approach to the scares, if you can call them that, in the first half of the film. The horror in Goodnight Mommy changes about halfway through, from purely subtle and visual to very unnerving body horror and even gore. Those subtle shots in the beginning reminded me of the old French film Eyes Without a Face. The mother is shown only in her bandages, with the audience having no reference point for what is under there, which helps us imagine the most horrible. She lurks like a monster in dark shadows and in reflections, and it is as chilling as it is beautiful, I enjoyed it immensely.

That's not to say I was disappointed when the movie changed direction to the much more macabre in its second half. Exactly the opposite, in fact. The directors handle both subtlety and violence incredibly well, resulting in two entirely different but equally enjoyable halves. This transition also helped keep this very personal, three actor, single location film interesting until the end. It helped it avoid treading similar ground more than once. And oh my god what a second half we have here. The kind of violence the characters commit against each other is so specifically chosen. It may not be the bloodiest or most disturbing ideologically, but it is always acts that are very easy to imagine and relate to, so you actually end up feeling them in your body as if happening to you. This is body horror done right in my opinion.

Goodnight Mommy also did something that very few movies dare to do. It interrupted the last third, the most tense part of a movie, with a hilarious 5 minute comedy scene involving some Red Cross workers. It was a big risk considering all the laughing could potentially diminish the impact of the ending once we return to the violence at hand. Instead it played it off masterfully and made the ending seem even more vile juxtaposed against the lightheartedness of that scene. On this note, all the other funny scenes in the film were also excellent. The beginning made me laugh much more than once.

The downside is that one of the twists worked really well for this movie BUT was alluded to way too well, so you guess it before the first third is even over. On top of that, it's a twist that's already been done in a not too dissimilar Asian film before, so it is old news for hardcore horror fans. Regardless, this weak hiding may have been intentional since the movie doesn't make that big of a deal out of it in the end. In fact, the twist creates a very clever distortion of your perception of the characters initially, and twists (no pun intended) your expectations of who is up to what. So although not original, it just made the rest of the movie better so I'll accept it as a necessary evil.

Goodnight Mommy is one of the strongest horror debut films I've seen. It is stunning body horror, and puts most other films to shame with its cinematography. Well-directed, well-acted, well-everything. An absolute must-see.

The original title for the Austrian film Goodnight Mommy is Ich seh Ich seh, which translates roughly to "I see, I see." This phrase is a reference to a German/Austrian version of "I spy with my little eye," which proceeds instead as "Ich seh, Ich seh, was du nicht siehst" - "I see, I see, what you don't see." There is an abundance of visually stunning darkness and violence in this truly disturbing film. So what, then, are we meant to see that we do not immediately see?

In the opening to the Austrian film Goodnight Mommy, two ten-year- old twins, Elias and Lukas (portrayed wonderfully by Elias and Lukas Schwarz), idle away their boyhood summer at a large countryside house. Curiously unsupervised for the first part of the film, they boys seem to exist in a single, golden, never-ending day of play, running through fields, swimming in the lake, and exploring caves. However, the light of the summer quickly becomes more sinister when their mother (the equally superb Susanne Wuest) returns home from an unexplained cosmetic facial surgery. To Elias and Lukas, the heavily bandaged woman now in their home is severe and menacing, and the boys soon begin to suspect that she is not their dear mother at all.

What unfolds throughout the film is seemingly a monster movie, the tale of a beast that descends from the hills to terrorize a town (population: 2). The mother stalks through the house with booming steps, almost machine-like in resonance and pace, trailed by a plume of ashen robes. She sets strict rules for the silence and sterility of the house, for which the boys are punished harshly when they refuse to comply. Stranger yet, the woman seems to prohibitively favor one of her sons, citing an unstated prior insult as justification.

The directors of Goodnight Mommy, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, are masterful at creating tension and mystery. Who is this woman? It seems impossible that this woman is their mother, or anyone's mother for that matter. At one point, after making too much noise, the boys are locked in their rooms, starved and forced to urinate into cans. They begin to have visions of their mother undergoing demonic transformations. They realize they must fight back.

Many of the mother's actions are objectively monstrous and inconsistent with her personality in the past. The film becomes more compelling, however, after the halfway point, when we begin to realize that we are, in fact, being told this story through the eyes of children. Lukas and Elias have legitimate fears and analyses, but their minds are walled by their own naiveté. We see hints of the mother as a damaged and strained person who is struggling to heal emotionally as well as physically. Through small clues-snippets of conversations, flashes of computer screens-it is revealed that some significant change happened to this family prior to and beneath the surface of the film. Trauma does not discriminate between the young and the old, and ultimately, after the film's graphically violent and shocking turn in the final act, we are left devastated for all members of the family alike.

As watchers of horror movies, we are trained to be vigilant, always on edge and scanning for the monster around the corner. This is more challenging in Goodnight Mommy, in which allegiances shift throughout. Where did I actually see the monster? For many years, horror films have focused on fear of children as a central theme, with movies such as The Ring, Children of the Corn, and The Exorcist all utilizing childhood as a conduit of terror. While not a direct subversion of this theme, Goodnight Mommy sets its goals higher, exploring the desolation and fear that can occur when humans at vastly different stages in their development attempt to reconcile themselves with transformative pain. Terror is never just about a monster; terror is found within.

There is a moment in Goodnight Mommy when the anxious heat of summer finally breaks, and the sky opens to a flurry of hail. The boys rush out to the back yard in cathartic glee to jump around in the chunks of ice. Inside, their mother stares coldly, her hollow eyes buried in bandages, her face obscured by blinds, her entire body sealed like a dissected specimen behind a pane of glass. In that moment, the boys and their mother are more like pillars demarcating negative space than a family. The void between them is terrifying, but nonetheless invisible. There is nothing there to see.

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It's virtually impossible to discuss Goodnight Mommy without discussing some spoilers, but before I jump into those (in the next paragraph,) I will give my general non-spoilery thoughts. I found this movie to be a poorly-executed idea. I admit that I appreciated how the menace of the movie seemed to shift as things progressed, because there were at least moments where I questioned who was really the antagonist. But the actions of the characters get progressively more insane and ridiculous to the point that I found it unbelievable and intolerable. What started as a good concept quickly devolved into a lame attempt at graphic gore and other gross-out moments. None of these worked even slightly, and just managed to annoy me instead. Needless to say, I won't be recommending Goodnight Mommy to anyone else.

Now let's talk about the major spoiler in this movie. I wonder if I was much younger or had less experience watching movies then perhaps I could have been fooled by the fact that there was only one son still alive. However, we live in a post-Sixth Sense world and this kind of thing has been done better in the past. When one character is completely ignored by everyone except one other person, never interacts with anyone besides that same person, and magically disappears from rooms, then that character is imaginary. They were so blatant in showing their hand that I couldn't tell if it was intended to be a twist or not. About halfway through I was hoping and praying that there was a double-twist that was coming (like the mother really was someone else) and the dead twin thing was just a bait-and-switch element meant to fool the audience. Sadly, Goodnight Mommy was a one-trick pony, and it's about as effective as I would be at trying David Blaine's sleight-of-hand magic.

Goodnight Mommy starts off as more of a fantasy with carefree but weird child's play abruptly interrupted by an ominous presence in a form of a mom. The film proceeds in cant-put-my-finger-on it threatening kind of way, where atmosphere and relationship between characters is less than friendly and very strange. They act like strangers, well, at least mom is. The boys, Elias and Lucas are trying to determine if the bandaged person whose face they can't make out is indeed their loving mother, but seem less sure of it as time goes by. You see, mom has returned from the hospital after the operations she'd undergone due to an accident.

Not much in this film is explained, firstly how the kids of that age could be left alone in a remote house while the parent is away for, supposedly, considerable amount of time. This part is the biggest gap in this subtle psychological horror with heavy dramatic elements.

But, mom is back but the twins are not content, she seems angry, impatient and hostile, someone must've taken her place, and the woman before them must be an impostor. The build up is somewhat leisurely, Goodnight Mommy is nicely made but it takes a sweet time while the careful viewer gets clearer idea what's the deal here. I'd hoped for a different kind of conclusion but as the film reaches the climax the actions taken by characters seem more extreme so some explicit violence is to be expected. Although the dreamy, cold then threatening atmosphere supported by melancholic images of a remote modern house in the middle of nowhere and surrounding nature are spot on, I wish the characters were a bit more fleshed out so we can understand their past and motivations. Still, clues and outright violent actions are there, so if you're patient the pay off is pretty satisfying, so the wait is worth it. Plus, for all its initial subtlety it handles child's psychology, dysfunctional family and emerging delusions in a satisfying manner never going overboard, not having to spell everything out and maintaining the aura of impending doom. A very nice drama/horror for those who like it slow but effective. And those who enjoy the twist even if it's been spotted well before the revelation. And to all a good night!

Obviously well liked by users, I feel tentative in criticizing it. Yet, I was not impressed. Mind you, I guessed what it was about after a few minutes only. In fact, the film is telling a story we've seen a few times before, the last one to my knowledge, in the 2009 "The Uninvited". It's a european movie, and therefore it's rather slow, well made nonetheless, well told and well shot, well played also by all protagonists. Was it then out of having guessed it, I don't know, but I was bored from the halfway point at least. It's not a great flick by any stretch of the imagination and, in my opinion, it's overscored here.

I didn't know this version of the film existed until I watched the American remake and saw this one mentioned in the reviews. Obviously, I knew the twist and ending but wanted to see how this one pulled it off differently. I do think this one did a better job of providing clues as to what was really going on and it was certainly far darker and more brutal than the remake, but the major flaw for me was that the 'dead' twin did things that one would not expect a dead person to be able to do, like holding a flashlight and candle, closing shades, and helping hold the mother's eyes open when the boys were trying to determine their color. It would have made much more sense to me if the dead twin did nothing other than accompany the living one from situation to situation and 'speak' to his brother on occasion.

I did prefer the remake in terms of the conflict between the twins, and I thought it also did a better job of keeping the dead twin from impacting any scene directly. Overall, I think it's basically a toss-up between the two versions.

A psychological horror film in the same vein as "The Babadook" and "It Follows" in which the "monster" of the film is really an emotional event that becomes a skeleton in the closet for the movie's characters. In "Goodnight Mommy," that event is a tragedy that occurs off screen and provides the film with a twist that some viewers might see coming right away but which didn't hit me until around the two-thirds point of the film, right about the time it's supposed to. It's an upsetting and effective movie, but I was disappointed that it veers toward torture porn in its final third. By the time the film ends, the violence has become the point rather than a servant to the film's point, and its gratuitousness took me out of the movie. Still, it's a very well made and acted movie, especially by the twin boys who play the little boys in the film. The movie's poster would have you believe it's a kind of "Omen"-esque story of demonic possession or childhood evil, but it's not like that at all. It bothered me deeply and stuck with me for several days after I'd seen it.

Grade: B+

*warning major spoilers! Only read if you don't want to see this movie or already have seen it* Well I feel like I've wasted an hour and a half to watch a movie that I knew what was going to happen within the first 10 minutes of it. This plot has been done to death and by much better directors and screen writers. Child suffers from complicated grief, imagines his brother never died. Mother gets surgery done after her husband leaves her because he couldn't handle his son's death (speculation, we never see him. All the pictures are gone and the only time he is mentioned is in a phone call saying after they separated). She comes back after the surgery and is not having her son's psychosis anymore. She tries to get him to stop believing the fantasy that Lukaz is still alive. She's mean and cold to Elias. So he thinks it's a case of body snatchers! There's a lot of evidence showing she's different I.e. Different eye color, no mole, forgets Lukaz' favorite song but she had good explanations for all of them. So they tie her up and torture her. Then the evil twin Lukaz keeps trying to convince Elias to not believe her. Finally after some gross body horror Lukaz(the dead brother) convinces Elias to kill her by setting the downstairs a blaze. I'm pretty sure he died with his mom because the final scene is both boys reunited with their ideal mom. I can't believe a lot of reviews on here said they were on the "edge of their seats." I kept falling asleep, hoping for a surprise ending and was totally let down. I would have given it 1 star but the kids were adorable when they weren't being little evil psychotic brats. Oh BTW if your son has cockroaches as pets he's probably disturbed. There you go. Now you don't have to watch this piece of garbage.

I found the setting, a post-modern house which seems to be located in the countryside utterly separated from any civilization, quite interesting. It elicits memories, whether real or manifested, of playing in the almost limitless, and more or less deserted, area as a child. The twin boys are interesting to watch, expressive even in silence. The mother is adequate, and portrays the vagueness required of the part.

The story is light, however, and lacks motivation. Moving along lazily, one is not especially encouraged to continue watching. There is a twist near the end, but it is almost overshadowed by the torture aspect, which manifests itself during the interrogation portion of the film. Over all, I do not recommend if you are looking for a good scare.