Thanks, I Hate It: Goodnight Mommy (Patreon)

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala's Goodnight Mommy owes a lot to the new French extremity, a school of film making primarily occupied with the boundaries of the human body and their violation. Think the waking c-section from L'interieur, or Climax's endless drug-fueled dance scenes in which stroking and gyrating leads inevitably to violent penetration. The problem with Goodnight Mommy is that its viciousness is never successfully married to its characters or narrative. Instead the film reads as a collection of sadistic vignettes without any particular connection to each other or to the film's overarching story.

Goodnight Mommy's story is simple and straightforward, but airless. A woman returns home after a surgical procedure, her face obscured by tightly-wound bandages like something out of Eyes Without a Face, and her young twin sons doubt her identity. One boy, we'll later learn, died in an accident not long ago, his continued existence part of his brother's delusion. This is communicated as clumsily and obviously as possible, and the sterile emotional silence of the boys' performances leaves little room for investment in the twist. Nor is the uncertainty about the mother's identity ever interesting or believable. Her generic abusive behavior is her only characterization, her occasional moments of real monstrosity bafflingly cartoonish. At one point she drowns a cat for which the boys have been caring in an aquarium tank and leaves it out for them to find.

The problem isn't that this is unbelievable behavior for an abusive parent but that the film lingers on the cat's peril and death with prurient, drooling artfulness, transforming it from an act of believably human frustration to some kind of Hostel-style act of extravagant artisanal violence. There is no humanity in the film's characters to make their inhumanity lamentable, no connection between them to watch fray or to grieve after its passing. We start out in an emotional wasteland and don't so much drill down into it as spin in circles, raising a lot of dust to no effect. Nor are the film's interiors or gross-out scares much more than what they appear at first glance. A cockroach crawls over the mother's sleeping face and into her mouth, where she eats it with a satisfying crunch. The twins tie her down and perform brutally inexpert oral surgery in their attempts to make her confess. It's disgusting, physically repulsive to an intense degree, but it means nothing.

Maybe more than anything else this is what I find offensive about Goodnight Mommy, that it wastes strong raw materials in pursuit of trivialities. Its grotesqueries have no purpose other than to incite revulsion, and at no point does it trade in actual fear. There's a cheapness to it without any self-consciousness, a puerile quality to its wallowing in icky minutiae without probing at the psychological horror underlying them. Sons killing their mother is a brutally psychologically immediate premise, but in Goodnight Mommy it amounts to no more than turned stomachs and a dime-a-dozen twist.