When A Cool Looking Movie Disappoints Us
The not-quite-cerebral not-quite-horror movie Goodnight Mommy
I know I come off seeming like a big-time asshole when I say this but, for me, the best movie of 2014 was the trailer for Boyhood. No offense to Force Majeure, Snowpiercer, Under the Skin and the actual movie Boyhood (which I still haven’t even seen) but the 1-minute-and-45-seconds montage of Ellar Coltrane aging from ages 6 to 18 with his fake parents Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, set to the sugary sonic RIGHT-IN-THE-FUCKING-FEELS soundtrack of Family of the Year’s “Hero” (the “Sweet Disposition” of 2014) really moved me more than anything else in movies last year.
By condensing the movie into flashes of universal moments (fighting with a sibling, looking at boobs, hating your stepdad, loving your real dad, making your poor mother cry, having some old asshole ask you what you want to do in life), the trailer manufactured a complex cocktail of nostalgia, regret, sadness and adolescent thrill. It made you want to hug people. It made you want to hug yourself. LOOK AT YOU, BUDDY, YOU’VE CHANGED, LIKE, SO MUCH!
By now we should all know the deal: Movie trailer quality has surpassed and is now nearly lapping actual movie quality. Perhaps it was an unfair fight to begin with. Brevity keeps things unimpeachable and cherry-picking the best scenes proves time and time again to be dually frustrating and persuasive. Thus, when the new trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens dropped this past Monday, the internet atmosphere was as chill and nearly uniformly positive as can be. No need to nitpick and critique (though I thoroughly enjoyed Albert Burneko’s quite rational “What If The New Star Wars Sucks Too”). Worrying or feeling angry? That’s for December 25th. Right now? Just sit back and let it all in.
Of course, you’d have to be a special type of asshole — a level of asshole I’ve yet to power up to — to solely watch trailers. As in, not watching full-length movies ever. For every great trailer that turns up a turd of a movie (never forget Watchmen), there are dozens of great trailers that lead us to great full-length features (UPSTREAM COLOR YALL). Trailers, while increasingly and ever deceiving, are still what you could call reliable.
No trailer in 2015 got my full body feeling things quite like the trailer for the Austrian cerebral horror movie Goodnight Mommy.
Jesus. This thing is a freaking masterpiece. It’s one thing for a horror movie to boast a trailer that jumps you with scares and promises a disturbing premise (Goodnight Mommy camps out on the good ol’ reliable grounds of In The Countryside, Nobody Can Hear You Scream a la The Shining, Funny Games and Straw Dogs to name a few). It’s another thing for a horror movie that does the above and yet at the same time promises something higher, more transcendent, something like art — something painterly from scene to scene, moment to moment, as if each keyframe were an entry into an art exhibit. All this culminates in this flat-out suffocating feeling of tonal dread. It’s amazing.
What isn’t amazing though, if you couldn’t tell from the title of the piece, is the actual movie.
What is this movie about?
- A mother, whose head is wrapped fully in bandages recovering from something not initially explained, moves her twin sons to the country after a supposed accident as well as a supposed separation from her husband.
- The twins almost immediately suspect something is off with their mother. Where there was once love and laughter, there are now only rules and silence.
- As the twins deduce the woman in bandages to not be their mother but rather a creepy impostor, a real threat to their lives begins to loom.
- With the narrative slowly unfurling its details of their past life, the horror of the three’s situation emerges, vertiginously suggesting that the woman may be crazy, the twins may be crazy or maybe both are crazy and the only resolution available is finding out who is the least crazy of the two parties.
If it seems like that description is playing things really close to the chest, it’s because the movie contains a big twist that gives detail and context and, I guess you could say, meaning to the movie’s narrative. Describing the narrative any further would almost force me into revealing the twist and while directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala badly telegraph and linger too giddily and too longly on any and every intimation of the twist, it really won’t materially advance my commentary if I include them so I won’t. This, despite the fact that the movie could stand to benefit from the twist being revealed earlier, maybe even as early as the very beginning of the movie. If you diagnose the twist too early, like my girlfriend and I both did, most of the movie eventually starts to seem like a magician trying to surprise you by pulling a rabbit out of a transparent hat.
This is a problem but not the problem.
The problem is the movie promised in the trailer — the one that awed with intimations of the artful despair of Persona, the artful threat of The Shining and the artful WTF of Beyond the Black Rainbow — and the movie seemed to be promised at the beginning of the actual movie is not in fact the movie experience that is delivered.
Praise the ambitions, for sure. But Goodnight Mommy cannot balance these ambitions and therefore cannot reach its ambition to be a great movie. It doesn’t quite want to ruminate on the aftermath of tragedy. It doesn’t quite want to step into the murk of the psychological horror of your family seeming suspiciously un-family-like. It wants you to think but offers nothing to think about. Then, most egregiously in the final third, it chooses to devolve into the kind of mindless torture porn — a fumbling attempt to shortcut its way to a Michael Haneke movie —that you so deeply wish this beautifully shot and seductively premised movie was better than.
Part of this or maybe all of this critique is a matter of having had too high expectations or perhaps having expected an entirely different movie. Expectations can be the death of experience, sure. But there is too much art and too much entertainment available to us to be wandering the vast variegated landscape of what to do in our free time, arbitrarily watching things based on no prior knowledge of the actual thing. Trailers exist. So long as art chooses to charge us both money and time, trailers should exist. If the movies are cool with our trailer-informed expectations being inextricable to the experience then, sure, we’ll agree to be cool with the occasional embellishment and deception.
