Goodnight Mommy showed some awards traction three days ago when its DP Martin Gschlacht won at the European Film Awards. The Academy, despite its scattered history with horror fare, is taking Goodnight Mommy seriously too: They’re screening the film for members on - of all days - Halloween. Austria is looking to break any genre bias at the Oscars this year with its arthouse horror thriller from Radius, Goodnight Mommy. The film, which was acquired by Radius’ former co-chief Tom Quinn at the 2014 Venice Film Festival for a low-six figures, cleared the $1M mark yesterday after a seven-weekend run, becoming the eighth foreign-language title to do so this year. Other titles scaring trophies into the hands of nominees included The Omen, which won composer Jerry Goldsmith best original score, while supporting actress Ruth Gordon earned an Oscar win for Rosemary’s Baby.īut put foreign film and Academy Awards in the same sentence and you really have to hit the golden-guy trivia books. Sure, they’ve had their day: One of the most notable hardcore titles being 1974’s The Exorcist, which landed 10 nominations, including best picture and director, and wound up with wins for adapted screenplay and sound. Seek it out and spend an evening in glorious terror.Horror films have always been the exception in the Oscar conversation. It’s disturbing in a big way, and will stick with you for a long time after the credits roll. But if subtitles truly are enough to keep you from enjoying a really great movie, there’s no hope for you anyway.Ī great piece of psychological horror seems rare in this time of “Paranormal Activity” and its knockoffs saturating the horror market, but in “Goodnight Mommy,” we find a slice of salvation. If you can handle a small amount of reading over the course of a tight, tense 100 minutes (which you can), you really ought to expose yourself to the magic of foreign cinema. That said, there is very little dialogue in the movie, so subtitles are minimal, and it’s a really great movie. One final note: yes, it is a foreign film and all the actors speak German.
I wish I could say more than that, but anything beyond “they’re just so great” would ruin a great deal of the film. The interplay between Wuest and the Schwarz boys is impeccable. Susanne Wuest also turns in a spectacular performance as their mother (or is she?).
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Just as good is the usage of sound: the movie contains little dialogue and is mostly scored by ambient noise, but the heavy silence is occasionally punctuated by low rumblings and spikes in volume that are as unnerving as anything I’ve seen in a movie.Ĭhild actors in horror movies are near-universally reviled, so I was very glad to see that Lukas and Elias Schwarz, as the twins, deliver excellent, wonderfully restrained performances. There is nothing rushed during “Goodnight Mommy” (“Ich Seh Ich Seh,” or “I See I See” in the original German) every moment is long and slow and savage in its stark delivery, and I was unable to look away.ĭirectors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz use lighting masterfully throughout “Goodnight Mommy,” as evidenced by the film’s tone growing darker as the images on the screen grow lighter, a reversal of the normal strategy in horror. I’d be hard pressed to think of a movie I felt more physically uncomfortable watching.Īs the film rolled on down the tracks with near-perfect pacing, I was squirming more and more. There’s no obvious place to start talking about the movie, so I guess I’ll start with the fact that it is supremely unsettling. It is really, really good and you should seek it out as soon as possible. Here is all you need to know: the mother of twin boys comes home with a bandaged face and distant demeanor after an operation, and the boys develop doubts over if she really is their mother. Please, do not look up anything about this movie before seeing it. I’m going to start right off the bat by saying I am going to try really hard to not spoil anything about “Goodnight Mommy,” a fantastic piece of psychological horror out of Austria.
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