Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Goodnight Mommy’ on Prime Video, in Which Naomi Watts Headlines a Remake of an Austrian Freakout Flick

Prime Video’s Goodnight Mommy casts Naomi Watts as Mommy, Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti as her twin sons, and us as the manipulated masses who wonder if this movie is making us insane. It’s an English-language remake of a 2014 Austrian creepout of the same name, a fact likely to elicit groans from the arthouse contingency that praised the original for being effectively scary. Speaking as someone who missed the original, I hereby review the remake with a clean slate, and declare it equal parts terrifying and maddening. Here’s why.

GOODNIGHT MOMMY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: An old cell phone video: Mother (Naomi Watts) sings her twin boys to sleep, adjusting the song to make it plural. “You are my sunshines,” she sings. TIME PASSES. Eerie music on the soundtrack. It’s been a while since Elias (Cameron Crovetti) and Lukas (Nicholas Crovetti) have seen Mother. They’re nine now, and their parents appear to be divorced. Dad (Peter Hermann) drops them off and they walk up and into the house and they can’t find her and her bedroom is disheveled and when she finally emerges she’s wearing a weird ski-mask bandage and because the movie takes their point of view, she looks like an alien. “What do you think she looks like under there?” Lukas asks. Good question.

Mother lives in a big, spacious, exquisitely decorated home. There’s a big barn out back, but the boys aren’t allowed in it. Same for her bedroom and office. Mother’s acting strangely; they spy on her smoking a cigarette and when Elias gives her a drawing he made of the three of them, he later finds it ripped up in the wastebasket. Notably, Elias seems to carry all the emotional weight for the two of them, where Lukas is more chill, optimistic. They act out, and Mother responds harshly. She was never like this before. Elias asks her to sing them to sleep, and when she refuses, the brothers conclude that she doesn’t know the song because she’s not their mother, but rather, an imposter. We start to believe it, too.

Mother’s an actress, a famous one, and by the look of things, the business is cruelly aging her out. That’d explain the expensive real estate and the depression and the plastic-surgery bandages, but we’re not here to be logical. We’re here to jump to the conclusion that someone kidnapped Mother and took her away and replaced her with a rotten-hearted doppelganger. There’s something weird going on out in that barn, by the way. They sneak in and poke around but – nothing. No sacrificial altar decorated with occult sigils or a UFO hidden in a haystack. What is going on? We got The Omen or Under the Skin happening here? Is Mother a lizard person or a clone or a robot from the future or something? NO SPOILERS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: If I told you precisely what movies Goodnight Mommy brings to mind, you’d pelt me with Kevin Durant’s game-worn sweatsocks for spoiling it. So I’ll just say that Let Me In was a surprisingly good remake of Let the Right One In that was scary, memorable and pretty much justified its existence (and put Matt Reeves on the path to being one of the best directors in the game).

Performance Worth Watching: Three terrific performances root the film: The Crovettis find nuance in their characters that belie their youth, and Watts levels up to them with forehead-vein-bulging intensity.

Memorable Dialogue: Lukas shows some hardcore TWIN MIND-LINK SHIT as he lays on the top bunk and tells Elias below him, “I can hear you thinking.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Again, setting aside any pretense concerning the original, this Goodnight Mommy is an agonizingly suspenseful vice-grip thriller that’s very good at playing us like a fiddle. It contains brutal sequences depicting things a parent should never, ever do to their children, and vice-versa. It keeps you guessing wildly deep into the third act, not ruling out even the most ridiculous things (voodoo? Pod people?) and feeding Occam’s Razor to the hogs out back.

After the fact is when the movie begins to fray and fracture. You realize its core conceit is a cheat that too easily explains away some of its most hair-raising moments, and it crassly manipulates us to keep us sucked in. You can’t help but admire director Matt Sobel – who cribs from twistmeister M. Night Shyamalan and the fetishism of Darren Aronofsky and Jonathan Glazer – for his magicianly sleight-of-hand, his taut direction, his tonal control. It never stops f—ing with you, this movie. And yet, its imagery and subtextual murmurs about the profound relationships between twins, and parents and children, hang with you longer than any big third-act plot revelation. So it’s about something at least, and is more than just a cheap mechanism designed to rattle your nerves.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Goodnight Mommy is a good old-fashioned Mixed Bag, but the performances are strong and it oozes with enough freakout vibes to warrant a watch.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.