Goodnight Mommy

Goodnight Mommy is an Austrian psychological horror film set during a hot summer in a remote farmhouse surrounded by cornfields and woods. Twin brothers wait for their mother to come home from hospital. She returns with her face wrapped in bandages after cosmetic surgery, and her behaviour has changed: she is cold, distant and quick to anger, and she imposes strict new rules that cut the boys off from the world outside. Increasingly convinced that the woman in the house is not really their mother, the twins set out to establish the truth.

The film is the feature debut of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, who wrote it together and went on to direct The Lodge and The Devil's Bath. It was produced by Ulrich Seidl. The two young leads, Elias and Lukas Schwarz, share their characters' names, and Susanne Wuest plays the mother.

Goodnight Mommy received its release in 2015 and runs 100 minutes. Its worldwide box office of about 2 million US dollars is modest, in keeping with a low-budget European production, while its strong showing on the festival circuit helped bring the directors international attention. On IMDb it has a rating of 7.4 from 147 reviews, and on TMDB a rating of 6.7 from 1,739 votes, indicating that critics rated it more favourably than the broader audience did.