Episode Transcript
Rated: R
Country of Origin: Austria
Run Time: 1h 39m
Directed by: Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz
Starring: Lukas Schwarz, Elias Schwarz, and Susanne Wuest
Movie starts with some singing by some people that look and sing like the Sound of Music. Twin brothers playing outside in some overgrown brush/grass and walking together through the woods. They walk into a cave and play in it for a little while but we don’t know that the boys are actually playing for like 10 seconds so we just think they are good as dead until they start to laugh.
Cut to the twins swimming. Elias has called for Lukas twice now with no response from Lukas. Lukas swims under the water and we don’t ever actually see him, but we do physically see Elias.
Cut to the boys’ house. They are looking for their mom and find her upstairs in her bedroom. She is covered completely in bandages around her face and is shutting all of the blinds in her room to make it dark. She looks like she might have been in some sort of accident. The boys are dirty so she tells them to go put their clothes in the wash and to take a bath. After their bath, the boys sit at the kitchen table and mom gives them some juice. She gives Elias a cup of juice, but not Lukas, and Elias says “Lukas wants some too” and she says if he wants some, then he can ask me himself. Elias suggests that Lukas apologize to their mom.
The boys then play a game of heads up with their mom in the living room. We learn through this game that the mom is a TV hostess for work. Lukas says “You like animals” as a clue to his mom for her to guess what is on her head and she seemingly doesn’t hear him. Lukas says it again. She still doesn’t hear it. Maybe she is ignoring him. Elias gives the clue of “the person has two kids” and she still doesn’t guess that the word on her head is “mama”. So this is some pretty fucked up mental torture she is giving to Lukas.
While getting ready for bed, one of the boys (Elias) sees a cockroach on the bathroom ceiling. When Lukas goes into the bathroom to get ready for bed, the cockroach falls. Mom goes into their bedroom to find the boys playing on some handheld electronic device and they get in trouble. Mom says she needs a lot of rest and that she will keep the blinds closed to sleep as much as possible, they can only play in the garden, it has to be super quiet, etc. she is only looking at Lukas. Elias gets up to give mom two shells, one from him and one from Lukas. She only takes the one from him.
The boys are talking under the blanket with a flashlight about how their mom is different and she’s not like their mom. One of the boys walks in on their mom applying some creams to her skin. The boy runs into his bedroom and closes the door. The mom does not catch him. The boys go outside and play in the rain, and go inside and have a belching contest. Then the doorbell rings. The boys peak outside to see who it is but ultimately agree to go get their mom. One of the boys knocks on her bedroom door but she is sleeping so hard she doesn’t hear it. After the boy leaves the room, she opens her eyes and starts to chew something crunchy in her mouth. She was just pretending to sleep. Fucking scared the shit out of me.
Elias goes to the basement looking for Lukas. Lukas’ name is called but Lukas never answers. A grocery store delivery man is loading up the deep freeze in the basement with a year’s worth of pepperoni pizza. Mom gets changed into a really pretty nightgown after examining herself in the mirror. The boys go back down into that cave from the beginning and step on a shit load of skulls and bones and we get no explanation on that at all. They find a cat whimpering and decide to bring it back home. when the boys open the front door, we see the mom quickly putting the bandages back on her face, almost like she was never supposed to take them off.
She tries to get into the boys' room but the door is locked. They did bring the cat into the room and it is under the bed in a box. She tears apart the room but only found a lighter. He gives her an attitude about it and when she is rifling under the bed looking for more stuff Elias claps really loud in her face and she goes into a rage, jumping on top of Elias on his bed with all her weight. Lukas is screaming for her to stop and she finally does. Later that evening, the boys put on their PJs and stand on the deck outside. The mom is seen walking through the forest stripping off her facial bandages and clothes until she finally stops and her head is spinning around like crazy. The boys woke up, it was just a dream.
The boys have an aquarium of cockroaches which is fucking horrendous. They take one and go into their mom’s room while she is sleeping and put a massive roach on her. It crawls up her face and into her mouth. She never wakes up.
Cut to the next morning, the house is clean and the beds are made. Mom is walking outside which is strange bc she said she had to stay out of the sunlight. One of the boys is playing piano and the other is outside with a magnifying glass looking at the ground. He starts a fire with it by setting a bug on fire. The mom is cleaning the windows. They take a photo album down and start to look through it. Almost all of the pages are blank. Words are written about the photo, but the picture is gone. They remove a photo from the album and close the door to the backyard. They take a laptop from the dining room and look up their mom’s name online because she is a TV personality. They find their house on a real estate website listed for sale.
They knock on their mom’s bedroom door and go inside when she doesn’t answer. She is downstairs. One of the boys crawls under the bed and places a device under it. We can assume it is a recording device. The boy is still under the bed and the mom enters the room to grab something. She leaves and the boy makes his escape. The other boy is outside on the deck, the door is inside the mom’s bedroom. They go downstairs to their room and cannot find the cat. The mom calls them down to do their chores. One boy is vacuuming and the other is looking for the cat. The phone rings and the mom answers. She is talking about “he has to face it, I won't play along anymore”. She goes into her room and locks the door. The boys leave the vacuum unattended and keep looking for the cat. They find the cat eventually and it is dead. They lay with it on the floor for a while with a candle.
Then the boys go back to their cockroach aquarium, empty it, fill the tank with water, and put the dead cat in it. They leave this on the coffee table for the mom to find. WHAT THE FUCK. They hide behind the curtains while they watch her discover it. She goes and gets the jar of roaches and pours them into the cat aquarium. The boy approaches his mom and says he just wants his mom back and that she is not their mom. She slaps him and sends him to his room. He asks to see her birthmark to prove she is his mom and she literally drags him up to his room. She makes him say “you are my mom” 10x. she says that tomorrow there will only be one set of clothes and one breakfast and to stay in his room.
The brothers have a punching and slapping contest. Then there is one of the boys having a vigil for his mom LOL there is a photo of the three of them and he has candles all around and Is saying “please mom come back”. Lukas waits up all night with a very large hammer while Elias sleeps. They are taking turns protecting each other. Elias wakes up and stands guard. Maybe it is a bow? I can't tell what the weapon is. The candles surrounding the photo go out. The bedroom door is now open and there is a strong white light. One brother leaves and goes into his mom's room and takes a box cutter and cuts his mom's stomach open. Cockroaches come out. It was a dream. The device was actually a baby monitor and they listen to her breathe.
The boys cut their hair to be the same and comment on how their mom wont be able to tell them apart. They have stuff stacked in front of the bedroom door and won't let their mom in. she says she isn’t mad anymore and they open the door. The bandages on her face have been removed. She is beautiful and has her hair and makeup fully done. The boys look back at the photo from the vigil and try to compare her face to see if it is their mom. She seeks a compliment from them but doesn’t get one. She gives Elias a hockey stick and he asks if they can go outside and try it. She opens the doors and the boys take off full sprint into the forest together. They do not believe it is really her.
They encounter a field of smoke and see a man with a pitchfork starting a semi-controlled fire. Looks like they are burning hay. The boys walk along a railroad track into a town center. Austria is so beautiful. The streets are empty except for one loud man playing an accordion and singing. They go into a church and encounter a man who is sweeping the floors. They ask him for help. He is the sexton, they ask for the priest. The priest is not there. They ask if they can call him. The priest takes the boys to the police station, and in the car, they ask the priest if he will do all the talking for them. Then we see the priest drop the boys and the mom off at their house. The priest asks if she has anything to say and she says “it was all a bit much. The accident, the separation.” And then she goes inside and locks the doors.
She is crying profusely and takes some medicine and lays down. She looks completely heartbroken. She falls asleep with the lamp on. The boys turn off the lamp and get out from under her bed. They have been hiding there. They take the keys from their mom’s bedside table. The boys wake her up in the morning wearing tribal masks by opening the blinds and letting the sun in. they have tied her to the bed with some form of cloth wrap and tape. They keep asking her to tell them where their mom is. They show her the photo they took from the scrapbook and ask her to tell them who the person is in the photo. She says it was a friend that always dressed like her. The boys don’t believe her. Her cell phone rings and the boys take the phone away. They lock her in her room.
They unlock the door to her office and go on her computer to watch some audition tapes she has recorded. They see photos of her in there of the markup of her facial surgery. Looks like she had a facelift. They go back into her room and are closely examining her face. They tell her that her eyes in the video were brown but her eyes now are blue. She says they are contacts and that they are in the bathroom. The boys are now fighting because one boy believes her and the other does not. The boys fight and give each other a bloody noses. The mom begs Elias to let her loose. Elias plays her back a video of one of them saying “I will not listen to my brother” and her slapping the boy and making him say it over and over. She apologizes. She keeps asking to be cut loose and Elias calls for Lukas. Elias cuts her feet loose and Lukas is angry and takes the scissors. He asks where the mole is that is on her face and she says they removed it in the hospital. He slaps her and tries to get her to admit it is a lie.
They take the magnifying glass and have her face tied to be still and burn a new “mole” on her face with the reflection of the sun. they tape her mouth shut and go outside to some monument and pray in front of it. There is a knock at the door and when no one answers, the people just walk inside. It is some red cross volunteers. The boys stop them while they are halfway up the stairs and say their mom isn’t home and the noise upstairs is the dog. The volunteers agree to wait until the mom comes home. they sit at the kitchen table with Elias and talk about school and other small talks. Eventually, the boys go to their mom’s purse and grab some money out of it to give to the red cross volunteers. They are confused about where the money came from and explain that they do not usually take money from kids. They come to the conclusion that maybe these kids have more agency because they can tell from the house that the family is wealthy.
As soon as the volunteers leave, mom finally gets the tape off her mouth to yell for help but it's too late. The boys then decide to super glue her mouth shut. Taking small cuticle scissors, the boys try to separate her lips and they cut her mouth and she bleeds everywhere. They stop and ask her to just please prove that she is their mom. Lukas asks Elias to ask her what Lukas’ favorite song is. She answers Lullaby and Goodnight and apparently that is not correct because Elias tapes her mouth shut again. Then they sing her the song. She has peed her pants. They remove the tape again for another interrogation. They set a timer for her answers and when she doesn’t answer quickly enough they force her mouth open with a wooden dowel and sew her mouth but then they stop. They mock her for peeing herself and tell her they are not going to change her pants.
They begin to untie her from the bed restraints while Lukas points a bow at her. Elias tells her she has to change the bedsheets. She throws the comforter at Elias and makes a break for it down the stairs. She runs outside where she trips on a wire that causes her to fall and hit her face on the ground. Cut to the living room on fire with candles all around her and she says that she will talk to Lukas again, make them both breakfast, put out both their clothes, etc. she promises she will. She says “it's not your fault Lukas died, the accident wasn’t your fault”!!!!! the boys agree that she is lying. Lukas “let her prove that she's our mom”. Lukas says “what am I doing?” while holding a candle by the curtains. She says she can see him, and Elias says that his real mom would know what he was doing. Elias catches the curtain on fire with the candle. The dead cat aquarium is still on the coffee table and erupts in flames.
Cut to firefighters at the house working to put out the fire. One of the boys is walking through a field of tall brush and when he makes it to the outer edge, he finds his mom and another brother. They both walk to their mom and meet her in an embrace. She sings the Lullaby with one boy on either side, staring at the camera.
This movie is ALL about the atmosphere. This movie is cold. This movie is hard to watch. I think ultimately it is a commentary on grief, whether the director and writers meant it to be perceived that way. The mother comes back from her surgery and knowing that Lukas is dead, she is experiencing the physical trauma of a really intensive surgery along with the emotional trauma of the death of one of her sons. We don’t even know what happened to Lukas, but we don’t need to know how he died to understand that the mother’s grief over the loss of her child is something that no one can fathom unless they have actually experienced it. I do think that we can infer that Lukas died in a fire because fire is a common theme in the movie. We see the boys with candles all around her photo when they are holding a vigil in the bedroom, we see that the boys lit a candle for the cat when it died, and at the end when their mom is laying on the floor she is surrounded by candles. The boys don’t seem to be afraid of the fire.
I feel incredibly sympatric for both the mother and the twins in this movie. These boys really believe that this is not their mother and that this woman is a stranger that had facial surgery to become their mother. Lenika Cruz in their article “The Primal, Familial Fears of Goodnight Mommy” goes as far as to point out truly how wide the gaps are in the audience’s knowledge of the story, like questioning where the father is or what all of the phone calls are about the mother is receiving. And the hundreds of pizzas in the basement freezer?? I think the lack of answers was intentional.
Throughout the first half or so of the movie, you are angry at the mother. You view her as abusive and downright mean to her sons. Then, when her sons turn on her, we feel bad for her, because she is being tormented by her own children. There is almost nothing scarier than knowing that the thing you created inside of your body is out to hurt you and potentially kill you.
The grief in this movie is overwhelming. Elias has to grieve for his brother, but his mind will not allow him to. The mother has to grieve for her son, while also supporting the grief of her alive son. There is a really great discussion regarding this in the podcast “Psycho-Analysis: A Horror Therapy Podcast” on Spotify. I recently discovered this podcast and am really enjoying it. The hosts discuss the burden that motherhood is on mothers and that being a parent is not always positive. We see the perfect example of this when Elias goes into his mom’s room, and she pretends to be asleep. She just wants to be alone. She just wants to not be bothered, so she can be sad and grieve the loss of her son and recover from her surgeries in peace. It must be incredibly difficult to ask someone who has experienced the greatest possible loss in life to then have to also cater to the grief of their other living son. Elias wants his mom to still make 2 plates at meals and lay out 2 sets of clothes and do everything in 2s but she cannot bear to do it any longer because it hurts her so badly.
