HOW do you know that the person calling themselves your mother is actually your mother?
Do you base your answer on how she looks, or the sound of her voice, or shared memories you had being raised by her?
Goodnight Mommy presents these questions to twins Elias (Cameron Crovetti) and Lukas (Nicholas Crovetti) the questions, as the boys return to their mother’s (Naomi Watts) home after an unrevealed amount of time, only to find her face entirely bandaged, as her behaviour seems out of the ordinary.
This film, by Amazon Prime Video, is a remake of another film from 2014, with the exact same name and story (and even ending).
Better acted horror
In concept, Goodnight Mommy works as both a horror and thriller film. It has everything the subgenre needs, and its lead by the extremely talented Naomi Watts.
Watts’ “Mother” (the character is not named) is an actress and this provides the latter space to play around, hinging on Mother’s mannerisms, that shifts from eccentric, motherly, volatile and charming as fluidly as the film demands
At some point, the film is guaranteed to gaslight viewers into either believing that Mother isn’t really their mother, or believing that she is in fact their mother and that the kids are delusional, or both.
It’s something the original film did quite well, but this time it is Watts that sells the “shifting psychology” of the film; in the original, the odd twin actors did it.
The Crovetti twins are just as good in their roles; Cameron is believable as the smarter of the twins, and Nicholas plays Lukas a tad on the creepy side.
Both twins – mainly Cameron – are also on the The Boys TV show playing yet another a character with “mommy issues”, so they’re coming into Goodnight Mommy with experience.
Disappointing mother
That being said, Goodnight Mommy has the same issues as most modern horror films; it doesn’t do enough to scare or unnerve the audience by going the full length of the horror medium.
There are two fakeout dream sequences, and both feel out-of-place, even if the execution is great: one involves skin being peeled off.
The rest of the film desperately hangs on its thriller aspect, being essentially carried by Watts performance.
Just for this portion, the Austrian Goodnight Mommy has to be discussed.
The events in that film show the desperation of the twins in finding their mother, and the film conveys it through graphic scenes that teeter on the edge of torture.
In this film, the boys basically throw ice water on their mother. That’s about the length director Matt Sobel and writer Kyle Warren were willing to go.
Given the locality of both films – one is in Austria and the other is in America – the remake should have been more centralised to American values, and perhaps a complete overhaul of the story while keeping the skeleton the same.
Without originality, Goodnight Mommy is just another tepid American remake, covered in bandages, asking the viewer whether its the real horror film.
