Written by Kyle Warren and directed by Matt Sobel, Goodnight Mommy is an English-language remake of the Austrian film of the same title.
The story follows twin brothers, played by Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti. They arrive at their mother’s country home, played by Naomi Watts, to discover her face covered in bandages.
She explains she needs to wear the dressings with her recent cosmetic surgery.
They immediately sense that something doesn’t add up because of her odd behavior, doing things their loving mother would never do. She sets strange new house rules, smokes in her bathroom, and secretly rips up a drawing they gave her.
As her behavior grows increasingly bizarre and erratic, a horrifying thought takes root in the boys’ minds. They have a sinking suspicion that the woman beneath the gauze, making their food and sleeping in the next room, isn’t their mother.
In Warren and Sobel’s version of the film, the fundamental theme is “the human need to be either the victim or the hero of one’s own story — never the villain.”
Compared to the original Austrian film relies on aesthetics and tone, the English remake focuses on reimagining character and psychology, emphasizing the drama over the horror elements.
“Some of the specific changes we made were to put one of the twin boys, Elias, at the center of the story, whereas the original largely treats the three main characters democratically,” explains Sobel.
They wanted to bring the audience into Elias’ experience, so they dramatized his thought processes. Another change was to create the role of Mother as not a monster but a flawed human being whose actions take on new meaning once the movie reveals the story’s core mystery.
Sobel and Watts weaved her performance to specific behaviors that make it clear there’s more going on than meets the eye. They made those moments vivid enough that when the viewer reaches the film’s end, they don’t need to return to the beginning immediately to understand what happened.
