Not so much ****SPOILERS**** as not-so-subtle hints at major plot points (plus sort of spoilers for Antichrist and the Babadook), but read at your own risk. Or go watch it and then read it at not your own risk. Or just go watch it.
Goodnight Mommy starts out as an incredibly slow boil and gives you whiplash by the end. The trailer makes it look utterly terrifying - twin boys certain that their mother, who has just returned from getting facial surgery with a head wrapped in bandages, is not actually their mother. This is the premise of the film, and it is a scary concept. But the trailer is also incredibly deceiving. First of all, it only really uses clips from the first half of the movie, and edits different scenes together to imply events that don't actually happen. Additionally, however, it gets the main source of horror in this film wrong - it's not over whether or not mommy is really Mommy, but over how far the boys will go to find out. This is a film that makes you both root for the boys and against them, terrified for them that they are right but terrified for their mother that they are wrong.
For the most part, I was constantly reminded of two other films as I watched it. Goodnight Mommy is marketed as horror but feels more like a psychological drama; I have similar issues with the way Lars Von Trier's Antichrist has been advertised. Here is another film that's mostly just terrifying because you don't know who to side with, or who's truly right, or who's gone insane. The two films have more in common than just that, though - both take place largely in isolated settings; both focus on a very tiny cast of characters; and both (spoilers spoilers) are really just stories of families dealing with grief, and the private horrors that go with it.
Each film builds slowly, feeling more psychological than scary; when the horror finally does come, it's towards the end of the film, it's graphic, and it's drawn out. It's the horror that comes not from monsters or serial killers, but from watching what completely normal people do to each other when driven by fear (which is really just grief in disguise). They're films that force you to keep watching - and make it horribly difficult to do so.
The more obvious comparison - and one that's been made already - is to Jennifer Kent's film The Babadook, about a mother and her son haunted by a giant monster. And also by grief over the death of the father, who died six years earlier driving his pregnant wife to the hospital to deliver their son. And really (spoilers spoilers!!) just by both of these things at once, as one entity, a monstrous embodiment of the grief that neither mother or son has been able to confront. What's interesting about The Babadook is that it gradually becomes the film you expect Goodnight Mommy to become - one about children protecting themselves against the monstrous entities that are their parents. Whereas in Babadook, however, Sam's mother really has become possessed by the Babadook, in Goodnight Mommy the children gradually become more monstrous than their mother. Even if she is different, even if she is really an impostor, none of her actions toward them is nearly as horrifying as theirs toward her.
So where does that leave the film? Aesthetically, it's excellent - the settings are beautiful, the shots are well-composed, the camerawork and editing are highly effective. Visually, narratively, it's deeply disturbing - waiting for things to get dark and then feeling completely taken aback when they do, though in a completely different (and far more unsettling) direction than anyone expects. And morally, it's exhausting - a story in which the mother, the sons, and their collective grief are all competing for most monstrous entity, and the race is a close one. And the ending isn't giving anything away.
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