★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
Goodnight Momm y is a genuinely disturbing Austrian chiller set in a glamorous rural hideaway home (very Funny Games). It features angelic-looking twin boys (Lukas and Elias Schwarz) who begin to suspect that their game-show hostess mother (Susanne Wuest), wrapped in bandages after cosmetic surgery, has been replaced by an imposter.
What follows is a slow ratcheting of tension and a war of attrition between mother and sons (she raises her voice, they shout; she slaps them across the face, they drop a live cockroach into her mouth when she’s asleep) until it ignites with a visceral third-act torture fest (blood, scissors and glue all feature heavily).
Until that point,Goodnight Mommy was startlingly original and beautifully filmed and paced by the co-directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz , digging about unnervingly in the depths of mother-son relationships. Yet to segue into yet another movie where a helpless woman gets tied to a bed and tortured horribly was, alas, something of a letdown.
Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, 15, 100min