Goodnight Mommy

Goodnight Mommy is a 2022 psychological horror thriller by director Mark Sobel. This is a remake of the acclaimed Austrian horror film of the same name. The ...

Mother only addressed Elias because he was being seen as the outgoing one and Lucas as the shy one. Mother explains for Elias to go with her and leads him to the barn. The police woke only Elias in the neighbor’s home and at the door when they followed up. Lucas has been a hallucination for Elias throughout the entire film. When playing, she explains that Elias didn’t know the gun was loaded and accidentally killed his twin brother, Lucas. Mother tries to convince Elias to untie her and not to listen to Lucas. The film centers around a pair of twins, Elias and Lucas (played by Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti), and their relationship with their mother (played by Naomi Watts). As she explains to everyone, she just had plastic surgery, which is the reason for the mask. She also tells them the eye color is because she wears green contacts for her headshot, which is in her purse. They break into a neighbor’s house that was closed for the season, and a couple of police officers find them. They lock the door of their room, and Mother breaks in and breaks down the door with a crowbar. She doesn’t know the song she sings to the kids at bedtime.

Twin boys Elias(Cameron Crovetti) and Lucas(Nicholas Crovetti) are dropped off at their mother's house after some extended time apart. Instead of their loving ...

The symbolism of the bugs in the original is used to show the ugly things that hide in the dark. Elias and Lucas were playing with a gun in the barn, and Elias accidentally shot and killed his brother prior to the events of the movie. Although Amazon Studios’ remake is not quite the horror movie the original was, it is still a troubling psychological study in pain. The Mother we are introduced to in the opening credits is doting, but this masked Mother is absentee, lending to her otherness. Even as medicated and depressed as Mother was, it is unlikely she allowed him to play with a gun unsupervised after he killed his brother in the same way. Additionally, the horrific dream sequence where Mother’s skin is ripped back to expose her blackened skin foreshadows her burning to death in the final act. It’s very possible that Elias wasn’t shooting a gun in the yard in the beginning at all. In this new version, there is little question that Elias accidentally killed his brother and is not an evil kid. Throughout Goodnight Mommy, Lucas, and Elias doubt the bandaged woman in their house is their mother. Elias leaves the barn and his mother behind. Amazon Studios remake of 2014’s Goodnight Mommy is a well-acted, constructed movie that chooses to focus on the devastation of grief and guilt. As a result, Goodnight Mommy(2022) is not as psychologically affecting or as mean-spirited as the original but is still worth a watch.

"It's not like I've been trying to make remakes," the actress said of the horror adaptation. "It's just happened, but it's been a while."

“That was the reason to do that movie. “I wasn’t going to be playing just a really black and white villain,” said Watts. Both films leave much to the imagination, taking a sharp focus to the tense three-hander. “When you learn the rules and the limitations, you figure out what you can do and you double down on them and then you really get very specific,” Watts said in a recent interview with IndieWire. But after having that first initial conversation with him, I really understood that he had a new take on it.” As the mother, Watts’ face is covered in a gauze bandage for much of the film, presenting a unique challenge for the actress.

Ask someone if they've seen 2014's Goodnight Mommy, and if their immediate response is to shudder, you'll know they have. The Austrian cult horror film combines ...

This version of Goodnight Mommy is a perfectly competent, well acted movie, but it won’t linger in your mind like the original. What made the original Goodnight Mommy so effective is that the twins are at least as creepy as their mother, and it’s impossible to tell who’s more of a danger to whom. That the plot is so economical in how much information it gives out, at least initially, further increases the sense of unease. As opposed to the loving version of her before the surgery, Mommy is moody and secretive, stalking around the house and smoking (a new habit) rather than spending time with her sons. A clearer delineation between monster and innocent victim ultimately dulls the impact of the twist, not to mention makes it easier to see it coming, whether you’ve seen the original version or not. To the boys’ shock, Mommy, a celebrity of some kind, is recovering from plastic surgery that has left her head completely swathed in bandages, looking like no one as much as Claude Rains in The Invisible Man.

Goodnight Mommy debuts on Prime Video on Sept. 16, 2022. Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's Goodnight Mommy (2014) smashes through your ribcage, ...

It’s not that Sobel’s a fool for approaching his remake from a different angle — in fact, kudos — but his execution misunderstands what makes Franz and Fiala’s the sinister showstopper it is. Sobel does well breathing cold horror air in a sequence that nails its scares in an abandoned neighboring house where Elias and Lucas fortify themselves. Goodnight Mommy is told from the children’s perspective as they notice quirks in Mommy that suggest she’s been replaced by a doppelgänger — Watts is comfortably alien in her skin, stoking the children’s imagination. Goodnight Mommy depends on preconceptions that favor childhood sympathies and begrudge elder mistakes as suspense hangs in limbo. In doing so, Goodnight Mommy becomes another hum-drum American remake that’s never willing to sensationalize or instigate like foreign horror. Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy (2014) smashes through your ribcage, tears out your heart, and watches with glee as you writhe — a decade-defining bounty of scorching bleakness.

An Amazon redo of 2014's atmospheric Austrian chiller struggles to bring anything new to the table.

The tired process of remaking foreign-language horror films, seemingly only for viewers unwilling to watch a film with subtitles, had largely, mercifully subsided in recent years and Goodnight Mommy is a reminder of why. The original was stylishly made and effectively creepy but it built up to a reveal that felt disappointingly cheap, like finding out a sharp designer suit was actually a knock-off all along. Without the fine, frightening direction of aunt-nephew duo Veronika Fran and Severin Fiala, we’re left with very little, a slick but soulless little movie that should appease neither fans of the original nor newcomers.

Director Matt Sobel remakes the 2014 Austrian psychological thriller, eliminating all of the thrills in the process.

Another horror film about a woman in peril set mostly in one location after The Wolf Hour (2019)? The audience’s allegiance is supposed to see-saw between the two sides, but in this version, neither side goes to the extreme and the result is a lack of audience investment. Another thriller where she plays a mother after The Desperate Hour (2021)? From Diabolique and Vanilla Sky in the 1990s to the recent Downhill (2020), a remake of the Swedish satire Force Majeure (2014), the list goes on. Another remake of a European art film after Funny Games (2007)? She spends half the film hidden behind a mask relying on her voice and physicality to convey what this woman is feeling. She’s stranded and adrift, a good performance undercut by a less-than-worthy film. The original Austrian film had shock value and genuine, gruesome horror. The film never comes alive. At first, the audience watches her from the boys’ point of view, suspecting every little gesture. Later this year, Tom Hanks takes on the lead role in A Man Called Otto, a remake of another Swedish film, A Man Called Ove (2015). In whatever little time she spends with them, she’s belligerent, yells at them to behave, and, most egregiously, refuses to sing them a bedtime lullaby.

Matt Sobel's movie is a far cry from the Austrian film that inspired it, but it hits enough creepy horror beats to get the job done.

The creepy movie largely suffers when it tries to shift gears and deliver actual terror, and some of its most “brutal” scenes serve as reminders of how it pales in comparison to the work that inspired it. This only makes things worse, until the situation reaches a boiling point when they tie their mother to her bed and refuse to let her go until they get the truth. They are eventually picked up by the police, who don’t believe their stories of abuse and return them to their mother’s house. The boys are immediately struck by how much she has changed, beginning to speculate about whether the woman behind the bandages is actually their mother. Oh, and there’s the fact that their mom had major cosmetic surgery without telling them, and now has to keep her face covered in bandages. Matt Sobel’s reimagining of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s 2014 Austrian film of the same name never tries to reinvent the wheel, but while it lacks the potency of the original film, it manages to keep horror lovers entertained without ever embarrassing itself.

The Amazon Prime Video film, "Goodnight Mommy," directed by Matt Sobel, is a remake of the 2014 Austrian film of the same name. Starring Naomi Watts, the.

In the meantime, his mother asked him to accompany her to the barn. Even though he cried for help, in the end, he could not accept the truth and pushed his mother away. He knew that by confronting the truth he would lose the comfort of imagination, and he did not wish for that to happen. Lukas stood behind him, asking him to trust him and not to believe what the mother said. She wanted to be a loving mother, but at the same time, she wanted to be in control. He lied to them about his mother, stating that she was not at home. She was not the mother he knew. Lukas and Elias left their home with their mother tied to the bed and her mouth sealed with tape. She discussed with the police the issues she had with her son, but we do not get to hear that conversation. She was not even human; she was a supernatural being who wanted to consume him. The belief that the woman they were living with was not their mother grew stronger as days passed. From the onset, Elias felt that their mother was behaving differently.