Film Review — Goodnight Mommy (2022)
★★☆☆☆
Returning home to find their mother covered in bandages and acting strange, her twin sons begin to suspect she might not be who she says she is.
As a rule, I try to shun English-language remakes in favour of their original counterparts. I have Spike Lee’s dreadful “reinterpretation” of Oldboy to thank for that. It’s with a degree of embarrassment then that I have to confess that I wasn’t aware that Goodnight Mommy is, in fact, the latest in a long and depressing line of lesser duplicates. We all have our blind spots, I guess.
As expected, the reaction to this Naomi Watts-headlined version hasn’t been all too favourable, with many dismissing it as unnecessary and lacking the original’s shock factor. While I can’t speak to the film’s qualities compared to its Austrian counterpart, it was a slow and frustrating watch. A film that often felt like it was reaching and not quite grasping.
Its general aesthetic — the clean production design, confident camera work and the sharp dissonance of Alex Weston’s string-heavy score — all very reminiscent of the similar, family-bound Hereditary. This desperately strives to be just like Ari Aster’s horror masterwork, but falls well short of that standard.
As she almost always is, Watts is impeccable, a stellar actress struggling with the weight of yet another drab picture on her back. But her performance alone isn’t enough to recommend Goodnight Mommy, another tedious horror, desperate to emulate the success of vastly superior contemporaries that helped put the genre back on the pedestal.
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