Goodnight Mommy
Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy turns Germany’s picturesque countryside into the stuff of waking night terrors with a morbidly stylish story about young brothers who suspect that their mother may have been replaced by a monster. After an unnamed woman (Susanne Wuest) returns home from surgery to her twin sons Elias (Elias Schwarz) and Lukas (Lukas Schwarz), the boys can’t help but notice a marked change in her appearance and demeanor.
In addition to the thick bandages the boys’ mother has to wear all over her face as she recovers from her procedure, she also exhibits a new level of strictness with the children that’s far from how she interacted with them before she left. Though Goodnight Mommy initially lets you wonder whether the bumps in the night that keep the boys up might just be figments of their imagination, it isn’t long before the movie makes you begin to doubt the woman’s identity and her repeated insistence that she’s the same person the children have always known, and just dealing with the stressors of adulthood.
