Review: A Boy's Best Friend Is Their Mother (Until Not) In The Lukewarm 'Goodnight Mommy' Remake

When the Austrian directing duo of Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz put out the disturbing original version of Goodnight Mommy in 2014 lots of critics threw around the admittedly clumsy term “Haneke-ian” (after the Oscar-winning provocateur behind Funny Games, The Piano Teacher, and Amour from that same country)—I know because I was one of them. I’m not just the President, but a member too! It worked for the most part though because Mommy (which is about a mother whose face is hidden under a mask due to plastic surgery and her estranged twin sons becoming convinced that’s not their mother under those bandages) had that clinical remove that stood back and stared at its horrors, unblinking. No, the movie wasn’t aiming for the same sort of intellectual and political vivisection that Haneke’s films do, but close enough. Well here this weekend the American remake, directed by Matt Sobel and starring Naomi Watts in the titular role of “Mommy,” has arrived on our Amazon Primes to try its hand at vivisecting us, close enough—so how’s it fare?

The horror landscape that the remake drops into presents an interesting rub. When the original film hit in 2014 it was on the front edge of what came to be known as “Elevated Horror” (and yes I hate that term as much as anybody does but it seems to have stuck to describe the period)—It Follows also came out that year, and Robert Eggers’ The Witch wouldn’t hit until a year later in 2015. At the time we were able to just point at Goodnight Mommy and say, “Yeah well they’re Austrian, that’s just how those people roll.” But looking back at it now it feels like more of a harbinger than the outlier it seemed at the time.

This remake dropping here at the end of 2022 on the other hand feels just a smidge too late. Horror is just beginning to embrace 1980s-type fun and schlock again with movies like Malignant and Barbarian, and heck even Pearl (also out this weekend) to an extent. If this Goodnight Mommy had dropped let’s say three years ago, with Barron and Jared in the White House and all of those Fake Melanias hanging Demon Wreaths up for the holidays, it would have felt more of the moment than it does now. It would have fit right in alongside The Babadook and Relic—hell make it a double-feature with Darren Aronofsky’s mother! and you’ve got something cooking.

If you are familiar with the original film—and I highly recommend you be, far more than this version—then there won’t be a lot of surprise here in the re-telling. Well except maybe in its third act stabs at juicing it up, America-style!, with some clunky CG nightmares that are brought to life by a shameless rip-offing of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. (A movie from 2013—now there’s an “Elevated Horror” foundational text.) Twin boys Lucas and Elias (played by Nicholas and Cameron Crovetti, who previously played Nicole Kidman’s twins in Big Little Lies) are delivered to their mother’s isolated and stylishly modern country home by their father, who peels out of there as fast as possible. The house seems empty at first, until there she is parting the curtains in all her Phantom-faced regalia—the titular Mommy (Watts), her face all bandaged up a la Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In or, to take us back to the O.G., 1960’s masterclass in the uncanny Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face.

Mommy’s lips seem ultra-plump and the circles around her eyes a little bruised but the woman standing before us is Naomi-Watts-enough that we know it’s Naomi Watts under the bandages, and once she starts talking forget about it. Clearly, it is she, the one who once danced with a giant ape on a frozen-over Central Park lake. Which presents the remake with its first mega wrinkle—in hiring an international movie-star goddess to play this part, the remake sort of irons right out a big factor in what made the original work. Susanne Wuest, the actress who played this character in the Austrian version, probably wasn’t even all that familiar to Austrian film-goers in 2014, but she definitely wouldn’t have been to foreign eyes. And so the film’s central mystery of whether that was their mother under the bandages or not synced right up—we didn’t know that woman’s face and voice well enough to recognize her. And when a revelation comes three-quarters of the way into the movie, we were surprised.

None of that lands with an actress as familiar to us at this point as Watts is. And revelations that hinge on that being a surprise end up falling flat here—worse than flat, they land a little bit goofy. Camp, nearly. And if the film had embraced camp more, like say the Orphan sequel (oh blessed Orphan sequel!) just did, it would’ve been to its benefit—there is, I will say on that score, one scene in Goodnight Mommy 2022 that’s a hoot and that makes the entire thing worthwhile. Watts thinks she’s alone in her bedroom, not knowing her boys have sneaked in and are watching her through a crack in the bathroom door. And thinking she’s alone she does what we all do when we think we’re alone—she starts blasting Edwyn Collins’ song “A Girl Like You” and doing her sexy dance in the mirror. With her fully bandaged alien head. All while her sort of horrified but simultaneously very very confused boys stare on. It’s the sort of scene that would give David Lynch the titters.

As with the original film, things escalate as Lucas and Elias become further convinced that the woman under those bandages isn’t their mother, and as Mommy keeps acting like a total weirdo for reasons that won’t become clear until that last act. Misery being her wheelhouse, Watts is as ever excellent—don’t forget that she actually starred in an actual proper Michael Haneke movie before! And she’s delivering plenty of the Funny Games goods, especially at the end as things reach absolute breakdown. And I might’ve been projecting but I swear I read a tinge of Watts giving us “Nicole Kidman” realness in this turn, which is a funny game of its own given Watts’ long-time status as Kidman’s best friend, and with the twin boys having played Kidman’s children before as well. That possible subtext is more interesting than anything the remake actually ends up doing anyway, and so you’ll have to excuse me for getting a little lost in that diabolical fantasy as I watched this just-okay movie play out before me.