Same old ultraviolence
Provocation wears off
Goodnight Mommy
In recent years a trend has emerged in European art house cinema to great acclaim and festival laurels and lucrative distribution deals abroad. It’s toward a style you might call antihorror: solemn, steely little films, often wilfully obscure, that tend to punctuate stretches of meaningfully ambiguous stillness with eruptions of vile and nauseating violence — carnage for the more discerning moviegoer, one supposes.
And who could doubt the seriousness of a Yorgos Lanthimos or a Michael Haneke? It’s the privilege of the anti-horror auteur to elude the charges of vulgarity that routinely cling to the directors of, say, lowbudget American slashers, because long takes and subtitles are of course a guarantor of higher aspirations. Meanwhile we are only happy to endure all this anti-horror cruelty — our noses rubbed in the sadism, leaving the theatre duly chastened.
This sort of thing might have qualified as transgressive at the turn of the century, when films like Irreversible (2002) and The Piano Teacher (2001) really did seem to take screen violence to new and provocative extremes. But every provocation has an upper limit. And it’s now 2015: it’s safe to say by now that whatever appeal this routine once had has long since been exhausted.
Well, I’m afraid that’s rather bad news for Goodnight Mommy, the latest goading anti-horror trifle from Austrian director Ulrich Seidl. Provocation is all this thing is after — and in all the most predictable ways.
Here is a sampling of the clichés of the genre it invokes in earnest: Small children behaving ominously; stray cat callously murdered; defenceless woman bound and tortured at length; facial injuries graphically inflicted; and innocent person burned alive. These might constitute spoilers had they not seemed to be willed from the art house ether.
It is a hallmark of the anti-horror film to remain coy until the end about even the most essential narrative information, and so naturally what Goodnight Mommy is actually about isn’t revealed until its final scene — though if you’ve seen an independent film any time since about 2004 you should be able to guess its major twist somewhere around the 10 minute mark. In the interest of preserving some of the intended intrigue I’ll simply say that the film concerns family and loss — two serious themes only trivialized by Goodnight Mommy’s crass theatrics.
What we’re really eager for, watching the action glacially unfold and the tension in the film slowly escalate, is for its pair of child stars to strike out nastily at mummy dearest, at least in the interest of getting on with what Seidl very obviously has in store. And we are soon enough rewarded with enough skin-burning and lip-slicing to send any respectable viewer into convulsions of wincing and cringing — though to what end I’m really not sure.
Seidl’s bids toward extremism feel rather like posturing, here, and all the more ineffectual for how late in the game these gestures arrive. Provocations of more consequence are beyond him. The only virtue his can claim is to be on trend.