Mark Reviews Movies: GOODNIGHT MOMMY (2022)

Goodnight Mommy, Amazon Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 15, 2022

Goodnight Mommy is an American remake of a 2015 Austrian horror film, which itself was released in the United States that same year. That's a big part of the challenge for screenwriter Kyle Warren and director Matt Sobel, who are adapting material with which at least some will be familiar.

Another element is that the original film, from writers/directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, is fairly challenging material. It's a psychological thriller about childhood anxiety and maternal frustration that depends upon a lot of suggestion and evolves into a viscerally chilling third act. Those who do know the material are probably wondering already if the filmmakers here stay true to the finale of the original. In the broadest sense, they do, but it's obvious that either the filmmakers or some executive decided that the first film's extended climax was simply too much.

One understands the thinking in terms of trying to reach and hold on to as wide an audience as possible. When the result neuters the entire point of the story, though, of what use is a larger audience watching something inherently timid and inferior? That's a question nobody involved in the movie seems willing to answer, so instead, anyone unaware of the original film or avoiding it in favor of the English-language remake get a version that's true to the source material's skeleton but lacks its guts.

The setup basically remains the same, although Warren offers a few alterations and inversions that might keep the familiar on their toes for at least a bit. Here, twin brothers Elias and Lucas (played by real-life twin actors Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti) are brought to the remote home of their mother by a father (played by Peter Hermann) who, in retrospect, is making a pretty terrible decision no matter how any of this arrangement was determined (The original film worked with the idea that the kids were already at the house and, hence, had no choice or no one making such a choice in the matter).

The boys' actor mother, played by Naomi Watts, recently underwent plastic surgery, and after that "tune up," her face is now completely covered, save for her eyes and mouth, in a bandage-like mask. Elias and Lucas are shocked to see her—or, better, not see her—in this condition.

Even more surprising to the sons, their mother's attitude and personality seem to have shifted. She refuses to sing the lullaby she always sang to the boys (To be fair, the young actors do appear, as the mother puts it, "too old" for a lot of the stuff that their younger counterparts in the original film would have expected). She puts down hard rules for them to stay away from her room and the barn. Mom becomes angry easily, and Elias overhears some phone conversation about her wanting to try to get rid of him as soon as possible. Lucas puts forward a theory: This woman is not their mother.

The storytelling in the original film was admirably simple and direct, working primarily in visual terms and using little dialogue (as a note to the curious with an aversion to subtitles). In this one, the boys constantly talk about their worries, their suspicions, and their plans, but Sobel seems to have little interest in manifesting any of those ideas—let alone the underlying ones about the uncertainty and fears of children or a parent's need for some peace and quiet can feel like rejection in a kid's mind—beyond the basics of a plot.

The suspense here is all but absent, and it has little to do with prior knowledge of the material (Again, Warren does change enough that it's nowhere near a shot-for-shot, beat-for-beat remake—although that alternative might have been favorable to this). The boys keep worrying and looking for clues as to who this apparent stranger is and what might have happened to their "real mother," and the mother's behavior becomes increasingly erratic and even violent, with a couple of dream sequences turning her into a fleshless monster (Those blatant scare scenes appear to try to compensate for the psychological tension that the filmmakers either ignore or fail to generate).

As in the original, the third act takes a turn, which puts things into the control of at least one of the boys, before arriving at a twist that this version uses to gloss over the potential horror of the situation just before it. As a remake, Goodnight Mommy seems to go out of its way to miss the point of its predecessor, and on its own, it's a pretty ineffectual thriller.

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