Nasty secrets surface in slow motion

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This article was published 08/01/2016 (3886 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mixing chilly art-house horror with brief bouts of torture porn, Austria’s Oscar entry for the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film falls smack into that nation’s tradition of feel-bad filmmaking.

Filmmakers Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz are drawing on the despairing Dog Days of Ulrich Seidl (Franz’s frequent collaborator, who acts as producer here) and the not-so Funny Games of Michael Haneke. Goodnight Mommy is not easy to watch, but with elegant cinematography, impeccable pacing and a thrumming sense of dread, Franz and Fiala make it hard to look away.

Nine-year-old twin boys Lukas and Elias (played by real-life brothers Lukas and Elias Schwarz) should seem like a picture of rustic innocence as they splash in a lake, bounce on mudflats and run through the cornfields that surround their remote country house. But the siblings are somehow unsettling. Whispery and wrapped up in each other, they reference the “creepy twin” trope that runs through such horror flicks as The Shining and Dead Ringers.

The boys’ rural romps are interrupted by the return of Mommy (Susanne Wuest), who looks more like a mummy, being swathed in white bandages. She is recovering from an operation whose exact nature — like many things in this deliberately enigmatic film — is not immediately clear.

Mommy must have complete quiet and rest, she says. And she has become suddenly strict and cold. This new harshness becomes even more apparent when the boys listen to a recorded lullaby she made to lull them to sleep when she was away, full of warmth and love. Lukas, who has been shown to be the more dominant twin, convinces Elias that this woman is not their mother but some sinister interloper.

As Mommy’s increasing unpredictability and the boys’ increasingly gruelling tests of love spiral into violence, this dysfunctional little family dynamic builds to an almost unbearable climax. The film’s cool, clinical control and understated unease give way to some graphic shocks.

The theme of the nuclear family turned isolated and inward, its primal needs somehow deformed, has been explored in such recent films as Dogtooth from Greece and Australia’s The Babadook.

Franz and Fiala take up this idea, rooting the characters’ trauma in some unspecified event that no one will talk about. The family’s home is not a gloomy gothic mansion but an austere modernist structure, but its open sunlit spaces hide some nasty buried secrets. There are photo albums with missing pictures, gallery walls with empty spaces, names that cannot be spoken.

There is also a related theme, just barely suggested, of Austria’s wartime history and the dangers of trying to repress the past. (The boys tiptoe through an underground catacomb of skulls and bones; Elias makes a teasing reference to book burnings.)

Goodnight Mommy can be read partly as a critique of the so-called “heimatfilm” (homeland film) genre seen in postwar German and Austrian cinema, which glorified timeless alpine beauty and pastoral simplicity as a response to the violence, dislocation and moral confusion of war. Fiala and Franz start their story with a heimatfilm clip — some hilariously wholesome footage of the Von Trapp family singing — and end with an absolutely terrifying inversion of this sequence.

There has been some criticism that the film’s final reveal is dead obvious. And yes, most horror fans will see the plot turnaround coming. But Fiala and Franz aren’t going for the big M. Night Shyamalan-style twist. They’re experimenting — using sadistic precision and taut tension — with the slow burn.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca