Review: Goodnight Mommy (2014)

Anyone who sees the trailer for Goodnight Mommy will agree that it’s pretty unnerving.

As soon as I saw it I was desperate to watch the full film as the whole concept seemed completely unique from anything I had seen before – the idea of two little boys left isolated with their mother, the one person who is supposed to protect them, with whom something is clearly very wrong.

Based in Austria (with English subtitles), the mother appears to be some sort of B-list TV presenter who returns home to her two sons after undergoing facial cosmetic surgery – and she is weird.

The trailer itself is representative of the first hour of the film, with lots of slow building, unsettling scenes and nail-biting moments all amplified by the silence and isolation of the house’s location on the edge of a forest.

Then a major twist is introduced and, if I’m honest, I felt a bit mislead more than anything else. There are still some well-put-together gore scenes that will make you squirm.

Maybe I built up this film too much in my mind before seeing it, but I stand by my gut feeling that without the twist we would have been on to a winner. There are certainly worse horrors out there, and few are as aesthetically filmed as this one, but I’d recommend going in without any expectations and enjoying it for what it is.

My rating: 5/10

IMDB rating: 6.7/10

Rotten Tomatoes rating: 85%

Image sourced from spot 30 segundos buenas noches mama edit / Bf Distribution / Creative Commons Attribution licence (reuse allowed)