The focus on games – childhood games, board games – make us wonder if a bigger psychological game is being played here. The house is dominated by blurry pictures of mother on the walls, which enhances the overall mood of incompleteness, of characters whose real natures remain unknown. But could she be doing it on purpose? Her questions and responses seem angry rather than clueless. A game of “Who Am I?” goes off the rails when the boys choose “Mama” as the person whose identity she has to guess, and she seems to get basic details about herself wrong.
This tension and uncertainty persists for most of the film, capturing the minute push-pull of the three characters’ interactions. Is that an impostor beneath those bandages? But the boys themselves display a certain coolness that suggests they’re far from innocent: Franz and Fiala shoot them like a cross between the two girls from The Shining and the two young psychos from fellow Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. The boys, when alone, wonder about what’s changed in her, and whether she’s even their mother. She doesn’t even speak to Lukas, or feed him. Mostly remaining indoors, mother demands silence around the house.
She’s sometimes bossy, sometimes dependent and vulnerable. There’s no warm greeting from the boys upon her arrival. The mysterious “figure in the attic” this time is Mother (Susanne Wuest), who has just arrived from the hospital with her face wrapped in bandages – for what reason, we’re not quite told, beyond a passing reference to an “operation” that’s clearly cosmetic in nature – and who has a strange, tense relationship with her children. Shot with ominous precision, the setting makes for an unnerving playground for 10-year-old twins Lukas and Elias (played by real twins Lukas and Elias Schwartz), who spend their days bouncing on trampolines, swimming in the lake, running through the woods, and exploring the piles of skulls stacked inside local catacombs. The house in this case is not an ornate, ancient mansion, but a sleek, remote affair filled with hard angles and blank spaces, surrounded by cornfields and mudflats and caves. One could say that Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s film is a Gothic thriller set in a modernist milieu. Watch This Horrifying Goodnight Mommy Clip
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