In Goodnight Mommy, two young twins confined to an isolated country house transform their resentment towards their mother into an illusion about her identity.
A mother returns home from the hospital, gauze covering most of her face – she's completely wrapped in ambiguity, as far as her look-alike young twin sons are concerned.
"She's not like our mom," one of them announces, and not without reason. She's almost an amnesiac, and a bit harsh, though more mommy weirdest than Mommy Dearest.
This precise, minimalist Austrian horror film deals in mysteries: Is this really the boys' mother? What was the nature of a previous accident? And what's with all the frozen pizzas in the freezer?
The coldly artful thriller unsettles with its lights and darks – sun-splashed Austrian countryside here, shadows there; brotherly love here, a deeply distrusted mother there. The setting is remote; directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala seemingly have taken a shining to Stanley Kubrick.
There's a twist at the end – let's just say the boomerang is a clue.
The terror is sophisticated, chilling enough to set the hair of the art-house aficionados' goatees on end, but perhaps not to everyone's taste.
Brad Wheeler