When the family is reunited, what is positioned to be a magical, music-swelling red carpet moment is subverted by unmistakable horror. “Moms are separated from the children for a month or two and they get a new mouth, new teeth, new cheekbones, new haircut, and new clothes,” explained Fiala. One day, Franz and Fiala were watching a reality television show featuring women who volunteer to undergo plastic surgery. She’s showing her true side and the monster is coming out.” That feeling of breached trust and dissociative identity never left Franz. “I thought: This is a monster now she’s not my mom. “My mother was covered with a blanket and acting really scary,” Franz remembers. But the scariest moment occurred while playing a game of hide-and-seek with her mother. As a child, she would falter upon seeing her grandfather with a newly shaven face. Lots of children think: Am I adopted? Can these really be my parents?” Franz herself remembers experiencing this disorienting feeling. “It’s like coming of age, confronting who you are and who your parents are. “Lots of children and teenagers experience a moment where they doubt that their parents are really their parents,” added Franz, co-director and Fiala’s aunt. “They feel like, ‘If that’s my mom, then she always has to look and be like this,’ but in every one of us there are so many different possible personalities, and they change all the time.”
“That’s how children can feel,” said Fiala. With “Goodnight Mommy,” co-directing team Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz have tapped into one of the deepest fears in human relationships: that the person you know and love today may not be the same person tomorrow. An atmospheric, tension-laden psychological thriller becomes a brutal horror film that challenges bonafide fans of the genre. The familiar transmogrifies into the gaping unknown. What begins as an uncanny undercurrent escalates into a twisted dissection of identity, a cat-and-mouse game that finds all parties fearing for their lives. Who is this haunting simulacrum of a mother? She exhibits bizarre behaviors, including the apparent rejection of one of the twins, and doesn’t like the same things she did before the surgery. She’s detached and indifferent to the boys’ wants and needs. Instead, she imbues the entire house with an aura of coldness. She’s no longer the engaging, warm maternal figure the boys know and love.
Her face is obscured with a haunting bandage, and her personality seems to have changed for the worse. But the mother who returns to their isolated countryside home is not the same as the mother who left in the first place. The expertly crafted Austrian horror film - originally titled “Ich seh, Ich seh,” which translates to “I See, I See,” a German children’s game - stars a pair of identical twin brothers (Lukas and Elias Schwartz) whose mother (Susanne Wuest) has just undergone facial reconstructive surgery. To watch “ Goodnight Mommy” is to experience this very nightmare.
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