ON THE THIRD NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched 2014’s Goodnight Mommy (or Goodnight Mummy if you’re British), written and directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. Towheaded twin boys (played convincingly by real-life twins Elias and Lukas Schwarz) cavort in and explore a cornfield, a lake, a cave, and a cemetery near their isolated residence. They live in a spacious modernist house with only their mother. It soon becomes clear that something is very wrong with this woman. Not only is she suffering from external trauma that requires her entire head, save her bruised eyes and puffy lips, to be swathed in gauze, but more worryingly, she is mentally erratic and abusive toward her sons. She slaps them, locks them in their room, apparently kills a stray cat they bring home, and attempts to drown their pet insects. The twins finally take action by tying her up and inflicting various forms of mouth trauma on her to get her to admit that she is not really their mother.
Well, maybe.
For the third time, a horror movie about twins teases us with the possibility that one of the siblings is actually dead, since the mother refuses to speak to, feed, or otherwise acknowledge one of them in any way. She seems to be waging a campaign of coercing one boy into accepting that the other is not real. However, unlike The Other and Sisters, Goodnight Mommy constantly shows the twins together in the same shot. So, unless the film is playing a dirty trick on us, à la Fight Club, by presenting us with false images that represent what one character is hallucinating, the mother is actually gaslighting her children. Meanwhile, it may be that the mother is actually an imposter, as the twins adamantly hold. We learn that the mother had a close friend who resembled her and dressed like her. Also, this woman's face is bandaged because she is recovering from extensive plastic surgery. Later, the twins discover that her eyes are the wrong color, which she tries to explain by saying she’d been wearing contacts. Then, a telltale birth mark rubs off when the twins splash water on it.
So, all of Goodnight Mommy is basically an exercise in gaslighting, on the part of film against the viewer as much as the characters against each other. The driving tension depends entirely on our increasing desire to know what is actually going on. Again and again, situations are dangled in front of us that seem guaranteed to provide the answer, only for key evidence to be withheld through cleverly ambiguous phrasing and staging. And—paradoxical spoiler warning—in the end we receive no definitive reveal. What we do get are clearer and clearer statements of the two possibilities already mentioned: either one of the twins has died and the other is maintaining the delusion that he is alive (which thankfully the filmmakers at least acknowledge as the expected twist), or the mother is a doppelgänger who for some reason wants the twins to believe that one of them is not real. There is plenty of textual evidence that the latter is the case, but the film often perversely sides with the mother in wanting us to think that it’s the former.
Overall, by these narrative and structural means, as well as through its patient and stylish directing, Goodnight Mommy effectively builds up around us a delirious labyrinth of lost identity.
In terms of our theme, TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS, well, here we get both. The doppelgänger, if the twins’ theory is right, has used modern medicine rather than magic to replace her former friend, changeling-like. And given that this is our second horror film (admittedly by design) featuring twin ten year old boys, one of whom may actually be dead, we can also say that Goodnight Mommy stands as a cinematic double to The Other. A side effect of watching these twins-horror flicks back to back is that we are left with no reassurance that the threat is contained in only a movie. You see, the same killer seems to stalk us across all doppelgänger stories. And we may begin to ask, does a duplicate monster even need to wield a deadly weapon? Isn’t the very existence of a true double enough to bring about our end, since it means the death of our unique identity?
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