Through small clues-snippets of conversations, flashes of computer screens–it is revealed that some significant change happened to this family prior to and beneath the surface of the film. We see hints of the mother as a damaged and strained person who is struggling to heal emotionally as well as physically. Lukas and Elias have legitimate fears and analyses, but their minds are walled by their own naiveté. The film becomes more compelling, however, after the halfway point, when we begin to realize that we are, in fact, being told this story through the eyes of children. Many of the mother's actions are objectively monstrous and inconsistent with her personality in the past. They begin to have visions of their mother undergoing demonic transformations. At one point, after making too much noise, the boys are locked in their rooms, starved and forced to urinate into cans. Who is this woman? It seems impossible that this woman is their mother, or anyone's mother for that matter. The directors of Goodnight Mommy, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, are masterful at creating tension and mystery.
Stranger yet, the woman seems to prohibitively favor one of her sons, citing an unstated prior insult as justification. She sets strict rules for the silence and sterility of the house, for which the boys are punished harshly when they refuse to comply. The mother stalks through the house with booming steps, almost machine-like in resonance and pace, trailed by a plume of ashen robes. What unfolds throughout the film is seemingly a monster movie, the tale of a beast that descends from the hills to terrorize a town (population: 2). To Elias and Lukas, the heavily bandaged woman now in their home is severe and menacing, and the boys soon begin to suspect that she is not their dear mother at all. However, the light of the summer quickly becomes more sinister when their mother (the equally superb Susanne Wuest) returns home from an unexplained cosmetic facial surgery. Curiously unsupervised for the first part of the film, they boys seem to exist in a single, golden, never-ending day of play, running through fields, swimming in the lake, and exploring caves. So what, then, are we meant to see that we do not immediately see? In the opening to the Austrian film Goodnight Mommy, two ten-year- old twins, Elias and Lukas (portrayed wonderfully by Elias and Lukas Schwarz), idle away their boyhood summer at a large countryside house. The original title for the Austrian film Goodnight Mommy is Ich seh Ich seh, which translates roughly to "I see, I see." This phrase is a reference to a German/Austrian version of "I spy with my little eye," which proceeds instead as "Ich seh, Ich seh, was du nicht siehst" – "I see, I see, what you don't see." There is an abundance of visually stunning darkness and violence in this truly disturbing film.
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