Critic Reviews

Goodnight Mommy, a brilliantly sinister horror film in the recent art-house mold of "The Babadook" and "It Follows," has a premise that cracks like the whip of a devil’s tail.

An intelligently staged and executed creepfest that takes one of the most universally compelling of notions — the unbreakable bond that exists between a mother and her children — and approaches it in such a formally and narratively bleak manner that it makes the works of fellow countryman Michael Haneke seeming almost benign by comparison.

It’s a masterful example of genre filmmaking’s ability to transcend its limitations, leaving a viewer not just frightened, but also changed.

The story's acceleration from anxiety to panic to hellish chaos is expertly managed, but more impressively, so is the control of internal narrative logic.

Beginning with a gentle lullaby and ending with a tightly packed wallop, Goodnight Mommy is one viscerally chilling, seriously unsettling horror film.

Goodnight Mommy is the kind of movie you should experience without watching the trailer or learning too much about it — and then experience again with the full knowledge of what happened, so you can admire the ways in which the puzzle was put together.

This elegantly nasty little potboiler should satisfy those brave enough to brave it. They might see the big reveal coming, but that won’t help them unsee the horrors leading up to it.

Shooting in sleek 35mm, Franz and Fiala have dreamt up a home-invasion scenario where the aggressors lived there all along.

Unspooling with virtually no music and a seriously unsettling sound design, Goodnight Mommy gains significant traction from small moments.

Good movies create their own worlds, and that’s certainly true of Goodnight Mommy — even if it’s a world you wouldn’t want to live in.