All the way back in 2014, Austrian co-writers and directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala brought an impressively disturbing horror movie to the Venice Film Festival. Called Goodnight Mommy, the film told the story of a mother, her two twins, and an unfortunately isolated lake house. What happens in that house (and, indeed, to the people who live there) is best left for new viewers to discover on their own, but rest assured that it's all very Not Great, Bob.
The original Goodnight Mommy went on to a reasonable amount of success, and now, nearly a decade after the original hit Venice, an American remake starring the great Naomi Watts is on the way via Prime Video and director Matt Sobel.
Let's take a look at the film's just-released trailer and see how faithful it is to the source material...
Oh, this looks very faithful to the source material, indeed. Naomi Watts, here playing the titular Mommy, appears to be having good fun here, and this trailer's cut in such a way that it's not too spoilery for as-yet-uninformed viewers. It shows off a few moments that probably could've been left out of this trailer, sure, but since when has that not been the case? As far as these things go, we're willing to give this trailer our seal of approval (and are looking forward to catching this one when it drops).
Here's Goodnight Mommy's plot synopsis, in case the above was unclear:
When twin brothers (Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti) arrive at their mother’s (Naomi Watts) country home to discover her face covered in bandages—the result, she explains, of recent cosmetic surgery—they immediately sense that something doesn’t add up. She sets strange new house rules, smokes in her bathroom, and secretly rips up a drawing they gave her—things their loving mother would never do. As her behavior grows increasingly bizarre and erratic, a horrifying thought takes root in the boys’ minds: The sinking suspicion that the woman beneath the gauze, who’s making their food and sleeping in the next room, isn’t their mother at all.
Will the Goodnight Mommy remake stand up to Franz and Fiala's 2014 original? We'll find out on Sept 16th. when the new Goodnight Mommy hits Prime Video.
