The person who wrote this film is seriously deranged.
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Goodnight Mommy
Benjen_Snark — 9 years ago(November 19, 2016 12:07 PM)
I've seen a lot of horror movies in my lifetime, and it's been quite awhile since I've come across one so shockingly depraved for the sake of creating an absolutely disgusting final act. The movie offers a bait and switch premise: "Evil mommy turns out to actually be the good guy when her deranged child who refuses to accept that his brother is deceased murders her." That is the entire point of the movie, and the writer uses extreme gaps in logic as well as suspension of belief in order to get there. The worst part of it all is that we've seen this tired trope before and seen it handled much better than it was here.
I had pretty much guessed the premise within the first five minutes of the movie when the mother refused to feed Lukas and hoped that the rest of the movie would surprise me, but alas, no such luck here. Instead what we have is a movie that conveniently and quickly checks off the tropes as it goes. We have jump scares, we have gross out scenes (cockroach in the mouth), we have potential saviors showing up and then leaving before they can rescue the character in trouble, and then we have straight up torture porn in the final act. To make matters worse, in order to bring the viewer to all these places, the script required that the three main characters never actually communicate with one another.
The mother character never sits Elias down and explains to him: "Listen, what we've been through has been rough, but your brother is dead and we will get through this," which if done at any point repeatedly throughout the film would have solved everything. Instead, even as she's being brutalized and having her teeth sawn out of her mouth by her son, she keeps completely mum and never explains to him what's happening. It's just so lame. And then to cap it off you have the two brothers in the film acting less like scared children and more like deranged and practiced serial killers instead. We know from the beginning of the movie that they have a father, but no one ever thinks to pick up and telephone and say: "Gee whiz dad, we think Mom got replaced by a monster," no That would be too easy. Instead we're going to whittle pencils down into crossbow bolts and glue mommy to the floor and light her on fire.
Seriously, this movie was awful and sickening, but not because it was disturbing. No, it was gross because this was a middle aged man's idea of terror: having to actually sit down and communicate with a child that's going through a terrible time.