"Goodnight Mommy": Predictability Doesn't Destroy the Tension

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If a film’s big twist ending fails to deliver, does that automatically negate all the good will that led up to that twist?  That’s what I found myself asking as I watched the final moments of Austrian horror flick Goodnight Mommy.  I had guessed the movie’s big surprise ending within the first five minutes of screen time, and the film never really did a whole lot to disavow that assumption.  But that did not keep me from enjoying the film anyway.  So why is that?

Well, I think it at least partially has to do with the film’s rather novel set-up.  A pair of twins, Elias and Lukas, begin to notice that their mother has been acting strangely ever since her recent car accident.  Her face is bandaged up, her behavior is erratic and decidedly more mean-spirited than they remember, and strangest of all, she only gives Elias any food or acknowledges his presence.  The twins suspect that this woman isn’t really their mother and start to devise a plan to torture the truth out of her.

Now, I’m sure that some of you were able to guess the big twist just from that summary, especially if you are familiar with a few particular major films from around the turn of the century.  The suspicion that the mother is not who she says she is isn’t ever all that convincing, but seeing how she interacts with her children and how they interact with each other is still pretty intriguing, especially considering that their interactions with the outside world are confined to a few specific instances.  This is a slow burner to be sure, and though it has a tendency to drag on for short stretches, Goodnight Mommy seems much more interested in letting us stew over whether our suspicions of the twist ending are correct, rather than trying to shock us with a big reveal.

It’s also pretty subtle when it finally arrives at the child-torturing-parent stuff that acts as the film’s main selling point.  It’s easy to picture an American version of this film resorting to the most gaudy and over-the-top special effects to make its audience feel they’ve got their money’s worth in blood.  However, this Austrian flick is content to let the horror of the situation sit pretty much in reality, without visual extremes beyond piss-stained sheets and only-as-necessary blood.  The biggest impact is psychological, as the twins, particularly Elias, try to come to grips with harming someone they love, or at least someone they believe is impersonating someone they love.  It smacks of a child’s limited grasp of consequence, which makes the film tense not only for the situation itself, but because the twins don’t seem able to stop the train wreck of problems their actions have begun to build up to.

That said, it still feels pretty unsatisfying when the big climactic reveal at the end of the film doesn’t carry the weight it feels like it ought to.  But that shouldn’t discount the feelings the film evokes while getting there.  The twist ending is based upon a what is now a cliché, but the avenue by which it gets there is still disturbingly satisfying to watch, putting a new spin on the creepy child trope of popular horror fiction.  Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a new classic of modern horror among the ilk of It Follows or The Babadook, it still works pretty well for what it is aiming for.  Give this one a look, particularly if you don’t mind subtitles.

"Bone Tomahawk": Talented Direction Marred By Blatant Racism

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Bone Tomahawk is pretty bizarre piece of film-making, and not in the usual way that one might think.  It isn’t so much that this film is stylistically constructed or so incredibly bad as to be baffling, but it takes on the strange task of telling a story that is functionally a Western, yet attempts to infuse a horror element in the last quarter of the film that feels tonally disparate from everything leading up to that point.  It’s a strange combination of elements that doesn’t quite gel for a number of reasons, the most glaring of which is apparent from the synopsis.

This is the story of four men who must travel across the frontier on a rescue mission.  Their town had been raided by a tribe of cannibalistic Native Americans who had abducted three of the locals as feeding stock.  The sheriff (Kurt Russell), his back-up deputy, a local Indian-killing enthusiast, and the injured husband of a taken woman make their way across the plains, necessarily finding ways to get along amidst differing viewpoints.

The obvious issue to take with this set-up is the extremely racist portrayal of indigenous peoples in this film.  It’s a play on an old savage archetype that has since passed into antiquity in respectable cinema, but the film tries to circumvent this by making the people seem inhuman in build and mannerisms, being entirely without a spoken language.  There is even a scene wherein a “respectable” Native American goes out of his way to explain that these cannibals are not representative of indigenous tribes as a whole, but this rings pretty hollow when the basic plot construction consists of four White men saving a White woman from a horde of non-White racial scary-otypes.  The attempted horror angle in the final quarter of the film not only feels tonally dissonant from the previous scenes of character building, but it also acts as a pretty transparent attempt to remove the humanity from an enemy whose inherent personhood raises incredibly problematic subtext.

And the unfortunate thing is that this film isn’t even entirely devoid of decent qualities.  The four male leads are all well-acted and have recognizable personas and characters arcs that don’t feel like shallow archetypes.  The script relies on witty banter and character tension to carry the dialogue in ways that don’t feel dissimilar to a Tarantino film.  And director S. Craig Zahler has a definite eye for extended scenes, allowing painful and uncomfortable moments to play out in their near entirety to communicate character struggles to the audience.

However, despite the talent that is clearly behind the camera, Zahler is also the writer of this inherently problematic story that, while functional structurally and entertaining at moments, is offensive by its very conception due to its use of Native Americans as an antiquated plot device, and even worse, as horror movie monsters.  It may offer platitudes and bend over backwards to assure you that that isn’t what you are watching, as it’s anachronistically progressive characters may consistently convey, but I think the film doth protest too much.  Zahler may have a future career in directing, but this is a pretty offensive first outing for someone so clearly talented.

"Queen of Earth": A Portrayal of Feminism Through Madness

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Alex Ross Perry is an interesting dark humorist of the independent cinema scene, as evidenced quite clearly by last year’s Listen Up Philip.  He was very literary sensibilities that haven’t really been popular since old Hollywood, where star power was more important than it ever would be after and the best films were remembered for their performances more than anything else.  Though humor isn’t absent from Perry’s latest endeavor, to call Queen of Earth a comedy would be somewhat a stretch, as this film is less evocative of Perry’s acerbic wit as it is of his ability to coax a brilliant performance from Elizabeth Moss, who for once lets go of the subtle nuances of her characters to delve deep into psychological peril.

Two friends, Catharine (Moss) and Ginny (Katherine Waterston), take their yearly trip to a cabin in the woods in order to escape from the stresses of their everyday lives.  The previous year, Catharine had brought along her boyfriend as Ginny was going through a difficult break-up, leaving Ginny to deal with her depression alone.  This year, Catharine has similarly lost her romantic interest, but also has lost her embezzling father to prison and thus is in a similar situation when Ginny brings along her romantic interest, Rich (Patrick Fugit).

What’s interesting about this scenario is that Catharine’s character is perhaps one of the most feminist portrayals of the madwoman trope ever put to film.  Moss’s performance is reminiscent of Ingrid Bergman’s body of work, with the same kinds of creepy infantilization and incoherent murmurs interspersed with nonsensical laughter.  However, Catherine’s madness is a metaphor for something more than pure hysteria, as she is a woman conditioned to need the support of a man in order to remain functional.  It becomes apparent that her father sheltered her from the world with wealth, thereby fostering a dependent personality that needs dominant masculinity present in order to maintain a personal identity.  Similarly, the flashbacks to her past relationship show her as completely co-dependent and in denial of such co-dependency when an embittered Ginny points it out.  Catherine may be psychologically weak, but her weakness is understandable based on her conditioning to believe that men need to define her role in life, and her inability to cope is a direct result of that male manipulation.

As fantastic as this portrayal is, though, the film is not without its faults.  There is a late scene where Catharine and Ginny throw a party for no discernable reason, and the only purpose is to stage a hackneyed everyone-attacking-me delusion for Catharine.  Furthermore, there are times when Ginny’s presence seems entirely superfluous, especially since her character exists primarily as a grounded foil for Catharine’s insanity.  Ginny is supposed to represent how Catharine could have developed had her upbringing not emotionally crippled her, but she feels irrelevant when Moss sells Catharine’s struggle so effectively.

If you’re looking for something below the radar this Oscar season, Queen of Earth is a pretty great alternative to the accolades and fanfare of the next few months.  It won’t be getting any awards, but it certainly deserves to garner a fan following.