Even with her face mostly covered, Susanne Wuest delivers a strong performance.
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To make it more immersive, the movie was shot in chronological order, and the twins discovered what was happening in their scenes on the day they were shot. They were selected from more than 240 pairs of identical twins for their innocent yet potentially sinister look. Cast Elias and Lukas can easily shift from an angelic face to an ominous look.Įlias and Lukas Schwarz play the twins Elias and Lukas. The woman is engulfed in flames and burns to death. Dissatisfied with this answer, Elias carries out his threats and sets the house ablaze. She has not been ignoring one of her children: Lukas was the product of a coping mechanism, and only Elias can see him. Their captive explains that she is indeed their mother but that Elias is not in his right mind since the death of his brother Lukas. The torture grows more and more violent, until Lukas and Elias threaten to burn the house down.
When the woman wakes up, she’s tied to the bed and has to endure numerous abuses from the two boys, who demand to know where their real mother is.
After they tried to run and warn the local priest, who drives them right back to the house, they decide to take matters into their own hands. The discovery of a picture of their mother next to a woman who is her lookalike is the proof they need to confirm their suspicion. Meanwhile, the mother is still cold and distant, and the boys grow more and more suspicious: For them, it has become obvious that’s not their mother under the gauze. In their indivisibility and creepy quietness, they remind us of the twin girls in The Shining (1980). You can tell something is not quite right with those two: They play hide-and-seek, jump on the trampoline, or sneak a cat into their bedroom like any other kid, but they also collect humongous cockroaches they keep in a jar, create weird-looking masks…and also, it’s a cat’s corpse, not a live kitten. The boys escape the isolated house’s unsettling atmosphere by playing in the surrounding Austrian countryside. She keeps the blinds lowered, forbids the twins from making any noise at all in the house, purposely ignores Lukas - going as far as refusing to serve him food - and even hits Elias when he fails to follow her rules. In addition to that strange appearance, the mother (who is never named) starts exhibiting unnerving behavior. Plot Summary The two identical twin protagonists, Elias and Lukas Schwarz.Įlias and Lukas (played by the eponymous Elias and Lukas Schwarz), two nine-year-old twins, are taken aback when their mother (Susanne Wuest) comes home after undergoing extensive plastic surgery, leaving her whole face wrapped in bandages with only her eyes and mouth visible. You can tell that if there’s that much symbolism in the title, we have a lot to unpack in this analysis! From the twisted mother role to the use of masks and silence throughout the movie, we’ll see how Goodnight Mommy manages to build up such a gripping tension. Its international title that sounds like a creepy lullaby is far from the original German one, Ich Seh, Ich Seh ( I See, I See), referring to twin protagonists’ dual point of view and pointing out how misleading one’s perception can be. Making their debut as writer/directors, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala follow the lead of other great Austrian directors such as Michael Haneke (no doubt there’s a Funny Games (1997) twist in the film’s brutal, sadistic last part) and Ulrich Seidl ( The Paradise Trilogy, 2012), who produced Goodnight Mommy and is Franz’s husband and Fiala’s uncle. In fact, maturity is a necessity when dealing with this show, which matches the hazy, gray backdrop of Portland, Oregon, with dark doings and sinister, mythological creatures who morph in and out of human facades with seamless effect.After a relatively quiet January 2015 premiere in its home country of Austria, the horror movie Goodnight Mommy (2015) terrified American theatergoers in September 2015 and has since earned a well-deserved reputation as a disturbing arthouse horror film. Grimm takes a decidedly grittier approach and so appeals to a slightly older and more mature audience. Whether they’re witches or werewolves or vampires, the entertainment world sure loves its trends, and one of those is popular fairy tales served up fresh with a modern twist.