Director – Matt Sobel, Screenplay – Kyle Warren, Based on the 2014 Film Written by Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz, Producers – Joshua Astrachan, Nicolas Brigaud-Robert, V.J. Guibal & David Kaplan, Photography – Alexander Dynan, Music – Alex Weston, Visual Effects Supervisor – Nate Overstrom, Visual Effects – Zoic Studios, Special Effects Supervisor – Eugene Hitt, Production Design – Mary Lena Colston. Production Company – Playtime/Animal Kingdom/Big Indie Pictures.
Cast
Cameron Crovetti (Elias), Nicholas Crovetti (Lukas), Naomi Watts (Mother), Crystal Lucas-Perry (Sandy), Jeremy Bobb (Gary), Peter Hermann (Father)
Plot
Twin brothers Elias and Lukas are sent to stay with their mother on the farm where she lives. She is a well-known actress recovering from facial surgery and must stay with a bandage covering her face while she recuperates. There is soon tension and unspoken anger between her and the boys. The boys believe that her changed and angry behaviour is symptomatic of something. Increasingly they come to believe that beneath the bandages she is not their mother at all and has been replaced by an impostor.
Goodnight Mommy (2014) emerged as one of the better horror films in the last decade. It gained great word of mouth for Austrian directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz who imbued it with creepy effect, while borrowing much from The Other (1972).
The English-Language Remake of successful foreign-language films has become a regular practice since the early 2000s, although the phenomenon goes back much earlier. That said, there are very few of these that can hold up a candle to the original – The Ring (2002), The Departed (2007) – and after that point I am struggling. This is the English-language remake of Goodnight Mommy. Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz have signed on as executive producers.
This was the second film for director Matt Sobel who had previously made Take Me to the River (2015). The script comes from Kyle Warren who was a story editor on tv’s Lethal Weapon (2016-9).
Naomi Watts reads a bedtime story to twins Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti
The remake trims and change some aspects. The Red Cross volunteers have been dropped and replaced by two state troopers (Jeremy Bobb and Crystal Lucas-Perry) who are altogether more friendly and less intrusive. The biggest change is that the mother does not remain bandaged throughout the whole film. When you have a name actress like Naomi Watts playing the part, I can understand that she doesn’t want to spend the whole film bandaged but this also serves to create less mystery about who or what the mother is. Matt Sobel weakly compensates with dream scenes with Naomi peeling off her skin to reveal something scaly and black beneath. As I have always maintained, dream horror sequences are the sort of last resort things a director throws in when they are not getting scares in any other way.
Matt Sobel also drops the visual alienation that came in many of the set dressings in the original. More crucially, there is not the extended sense of horror and sadism where the boys put bugs in the mother’s mouth or glue her lips together and especially the scene where they torture her by using a magnifying glass to burn her face with focused sun’s rays. Certainly, the two twin boys Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti both give fine performances and I would go so far to say are better than Lukas and Elias Schwartz were in the original.
Stripped of its horror effect and with the mother unmasked soon into the game, this makes Goodnight Mommy 2022 into no more than a fairly average tv movie thriller. The twist ending came with some jolt effect in the original. Knowing what the twist is, it is impossible to replicate the surprise in watching the remake. It is nevertheless fascinating watching the subtle clues – the mother’s upset when Elias talks about “we”, the issue of the drawing – that only become apparent when you know the surprise. On the other hand, my viewing companion reached the end and shrugged “that was kind of ho-hum,” so I can take from that that one can say it fails to come with much in the way of impact this time around.
