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Overview

Gotta ask - what is creepier? The cockroaches crawling over the woman's face

or the boy(s)?

Did I mention creepy? Probably because much of this movie is creepy. And it keeps you guessing and wondering. If the definition of horror is to make one unsettled, this movie nailed it.

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9000184

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight_Mommy

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Transcript

S06 E06 Goodnight Mommy

we're getting close to done with Season 6 already. I gotta get caught up putting them on the website. But today we're doing, I think, number seven, Goodnight Mommy, which I try and think of something to say.

I really couldn't think of much of anything for this one.

Yeah, ich seh. And I apologize to my German boss for horribly mispronouncing your language there, but yeah, Goodnight Mommy, or in German, I see

Yes, which is an interesting title. So let's look into it. S- get your subtitles rolling. That's what they should do. They should listen to us, but put the German subtitles up so it fits

Oh yeah. Yeah. That'd be good. The movie's from 2015. It is an Austrian film. Technically it's not German, it's Austrian. And it runs an hour and 39 minutes

Which is a good time.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a good time

wait, hold on a second. Gosh dang it. I didn't check this before. My my… Keep going. I'm, I'll be here somewhere. My, my microphone's not working right. Go, keep going

Okay. The fil- the film was shot for $1.9 million, and it was shot consecutively over six weeks in this kind of very nice remote location outside of Vienna. It grossed about

All right, so we were talking about the movie. You were saying it filmed over weeks sequentially, which i- which is interesting. I was trying to get my microphone working. I had a comment on that 'cause I find that it, I think that fits the movie really well and probably gave it some disjointed feeling to the movie filming it, "Oh, we haven't filmed for four days," or whatever,

yeah. It yeah, we'll just do this now. It was shot consecutively because no one got the script. The directors and writers chose to keep everyone in the dark about how the story was going to go.

So they would show up and then get what they were doing for the day, and then proceed from there. So the cast and the crew knew what was going on.

The crew knew what was going on, the directors knew what was going on, but the actors just knew, they were s- they were in this scary movie about a mom and her kids, and that was pretty much all the more they knew until they'd show up that day

Okay, that's very interesting because w- we s- talked a little bit the other night briefly about this, that, "Oh, let's keep people in the dark and give it that surprise," or whatever. There wasn't any bit of this that had me confused as to what was going on, like right from the beginning. They had wonderful intentions on that, I think, but I don't think it came across in the movie as far as hiding any twist or what was going on, for me at least.

Yeah. And I, they said that the twist wasn't the main impetus for making the film. If it surprised you, great. If it didn't, th- that's no skin off their nose. They were just happy to make this film the way it did, and it works really well. I think especially with the cast they had two members of the cast were nine,

And I'll guarantee you they had no idea what was going on

Probably not. And tho- those the boys were pretty good. The one-- Actually, I noticed the one seemed a little better than the other. The s- more silent one seemed not quite as k- not quite as good on, the way he make his face fit what he's trying to say or not say.

I could be wrong. Maybe he was, that was all acting on his part. But it's interesting that you got twins and one seemed a little bit more natural

It was filmed for 1.9 million. It grossed 2.1 million worldwide. Half of that was from North America.

Wow

It was pretty well received here, which you can tell because there was an American remake made of this in,

What was the

2022. It was called Goodnight Mommy.

Oh, okay. Okay

the movie did quite well. It received 59 award nominations and 23 wins.

If you're going to classify it for some reason, to me, it really strikes me a lot like Audition, where it's creepy and unsettling as you go through, and then when you get to the end, it's like, "Oh, wow, yeah, okay, that's a little harsh." It's not that bad, but

Y- yeah a little audition. I actually, the way it filmed and each scene played out, it reminded me of "The Battery," the way they filmed that and stuff. And that, that's-- I was sitting there going, "Man, this kind of reminds me of something," and it po- just popped into my head that it felt like "The Battery."

So

Yeah, it an intimate live feel to it almost

Yeah, exactly. I'm mostly focused on a couple people and like the transitions between scenes I think is what felt the most like "Battery" to me, honestly

Yeah. I… Now granted, I was watching old interviews, but at the time, the boys had never seen the movie.

Oh, wow

They'd done the whole thing and they still hadn't seen it back, during the press tour and stuff like that, this was s- was written and directed by, both Veronica Franz and a gentleman by the name of Severin Fiala.

Now, we had recently done another film with a female director who was married to her co-director. This is not the case here. Veronica was born in '65, and she had a job as a film journalist i- starting in 1997.

Interesting

She started writing screenplays in 2001 with an award-winning full-length Austrian film called Dog Days, which, is pretty impressive coming right out the gate. But you okay there?

Suddenly something start, music started playing. I swear I'm haunted today.

It's just one bad chord being played over and over again.

It's Eye of the Tiger or Stevie Nicks

She partnered with an es- this established Austrian writer-director named Ulrich Seidl. And they had worked together. He had a trilogy called the Paradise Trilogy that she helped him write. He had a nephew named Severin Fiala, and Veronica hired him to watch her kids in 2000. He was, like, a 14-year-old kid, and so he would babysit with her.

And once he found out what she did for a living, he would write up film reviews and bring them to her to read and critique.

Interesting

Now, he lived in a remote area, outside of Vienna, not unlike where they filmed this, and Veronica lived in Vienna. So she wouldn't pay him in money, but she would find hard-to-find films that she could find in Vienna that you couldn't find elsewhere, and they would watch the movies.

And they developed this friendship and discovered they had a mutual love for horror movies over time. And they've partnered on lots of titles.

Wow. I love that story. That's awesome. I who would wanna do movie reviews of little-known movies though? That's weird

That's a good point. The inspiration she said for this show came fr- for this movie came from a German reality show where basically like a women extreme makeover, where these women would be, like in a rut in their lives, and the producers would come and say, "Come with us for six months." And they'd go off and they'd, get them in shape and put them on a diet, and then do their hair and everything.

Then they'd come back and reveal to, the family. And they're like… the husbands were always like, "Yay." And the kids were all like, "Who is this person?" And she was like that was the thing that drove them into this this direction

the fact that he was watching her two kids who were horrendous and it j- he just wanted to kill them and gave him the idea. Not saying that

I, she was saying that he was watching her oldest son at the time when he was young. So I don't think, I don't think he watched all of her kids, but France is much more of a of a screenwriter than she is a director. She's got 17 pieces that she screenwrote and they include a lot of Austrian German stuff we won't know that Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy.

She wrote The Lodge, which is an English English native film that I've seen fairly recently. And it's not unlike this

Yeah, that's a fairly well-known one at the time it came out

Yeah. And she also worked on the American remake of Goodnight Mommy

Oh, that's pretty cool

She has a movie from last year, it's a period piece called The Devil's Bath that I'd really like to get ahold of

Is that what he had to do after he had the devil's candy?

And she's got one upcoming screenplay coming out called A Head Full of Ghosts.

Oh, okay

Now, of the 17 pieces that she wrote, she's directed six of them, and they were all ones that she wrote. So she's directing her own work. She started with a documentary that she did on this controversial actor-director from Germany named Peter Kern.

She did it in 2012. She wrote and directed that. That was her first. And then, she's gone on to direct six more based on stuff that she's written In interviews, she was saying this film was an exploration about identity. What makes you? And can that change? They hoped that they would have a film people would enjoy, but they would be really excited to have a film that people would talk about afterwards.

I can understand that

That whole thing you were talking about Jordan Peele, about going to see the movie and then getting pie and sitting around and talking about it. I would-- That would-- They would just love that. And one of the things that was their favorite was that somebody fainted during one of their movies, and that excited them very much, so They did something really interesting in this film 'cause it's not like… It's not the first film to do this storyline, which we'll get into later. But they filmed this from the children's perspective, which makes it more surreal and terrifying much up until the end, and then when the end hits, then the script flips and you're not scared for the children, you're scared of the children

Yes, very much and that they did do a good job of that. Even though I was like, "Oh, I kinda know what's going on," it got to the point where I'm like, "Okay, maybe they're gonna twist it a different way. I'm- maybe I'm not right on this." That they did pretty good I would say

Yeah. They left the characters' backstories to the actors themselves. They knew the general gist they wanted f- to tell the story, but all of the details they just left to the actors to come up with on their own

Which, which is a interesting choice, and I think that came across well too. They did that. I, I-- The one thing with the whole movie was I thought it it's not so much a story with a plot. It's almost a bunch of connected scenes leading you to a conclusion,

and that's why it reminds you of Battery,

Probably

that's pretty much the exact same thing. There's very little actual narrative story going from point A to point B in The Battery. It's just genre life and then, oh, now we find ourselves in this situation, and it's the same thing here

Yeah, you're right. That's probably exactly it

Yeah. There's very small cast. Now if you look it up on IMDb, they list eight people. But it's the sextant and the priest, and I don't even know you ever actually clearly see the priest's face. The farmer who you never hear 'cause he's yelling over a fire, so you don't ac- You know. The three real actors involved here were the two boys and the woman.

The boys' names are Lucas and Elias Schwartz. They were the twins. They stuck with their names, so their characters' names are Lucas and Elias.

Which, probably, nine-year-olds maybe not have done a lot of acting or anything makes it a lot easier

Oh, for sure. They've gone on to do one other short film called Applaus, and that's spelled the German method not how we would spell it. There's no E on the end of it or anything. So when they were casting this, they did a casting call with local schools in Vienna, and they were like, "Send us all your twins between ages seven to 14."

That just sounds weird by itself anyway

W- well, they were saying that you had this massive gathering of teenage twins in one place, and it was, she said, creepier than the film

What would have been great is filming that and got 'em all to just sit there straight, and then someone says something and they all turn their head to look. It would've looked like some weird Pink Floyd video

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They picked the-- they picked Lucas and Elias because of their fragility and their beauty. They found them to be very beautiful children. They're striking-looking kids, but they also look like a strong breeze would blow them over. So they're very thin. And the last casting, the last part of the casting call, they had it down to three pair of twins, and what they did was they took the actors, actress, and tied her in a chair in the room and would send the twins in and say, "Okay, this woman knows where your mother is.

How would you get her to tell you? And you can do anything you want." And the first set goes in, and they yell at her, and the second set goes in, and they yell, and they played with her. They send in Lucas and Elias, and the first thing they do is they go over to a table and grab a pen and start poking her in the arm with the pen , saying, "Where's our mother?

Where's our mother?" And they were like, they're willing to do that just in an audition, then they'd certainly be willing to go further, to further extremes in the film, so

That's disturbing by itself right there. And I don't know if I'd want these kids living next to me in real life.

For sure. And they said the willingness to immerse themselves in this theoretical search situation is what landed the role for them, so we did mention that the kids got their script day by day, which, at first I was like, wow. But that, I was thinking like soaps, right? When the soap opera, a lot of times it's not like they're trying to keep people in suspense, it's just it wasn't written until two hours ago.

Right

But the actual amount of conversation and dialogue they have is minimal. A lot of times it's sit in this chair and have a burping contest. You don't need to read a script early, early days for that, so

A- and there's a lot of silent communication between them. That whole twin thing g- looks like it's going on a lot. Which, is it the twin thing? Is it because of what they act- how their existence actually is right now? So

Yeah, and those kids actually tried to get information from the crew. They knew the crew knew what was going on, and so they would be hassling them constantly, trying to get them to tell them what was going on in the film. But, they all worked together to keep the kids in the dark, so

Oh, cool.

Suzanne West plays Mutter. And again, it's one of those things where the mother's actual name's immaterial. She is a figure. She is the mother, so her character never gets a real name.

Yeah

She was born in '79. She grew up in Vienna and started working at the Volkstheater there, which apparently is a well-renowned theater, at least in Austria.

She landed a leading role in an award f- winning film called Antares, and that kinda launched her career She's been described stylistically and physically too as Tilda Swinton's little sister

Okay

And I was like, "Little?" So I looked up how old Tilda Swinton is, and yeah, they're… Yeah, she's 10 years younger than her,

yeah

She's been in 72 pieces starting with a short in 1995 called Laika, with Antares coming in 2004.

She was in the 2018 Amazon Prime series Lore. I don't

Oh, I've heard of that. Yeah, I didn't see it

And she was also in a film which I just love the title. It's called My Brother's Name is Robert and He's an Idiot. So

Yeah, I like that one.

Yeah. She's got eight upcoming projects. I'm gonna list the four non-televised titles because I'm gonna bet the vast majority of our listeners don't watch Austrian television

Yeah, no, since my satellite gave out

So she's in a movie called All Five Eyes one called Cover, one called Ich Bin Ein Anderer, and one called Orphan III. So that's what she's got coming up.

Nice

I was watching interviews with her, and I've heard other people talk about this. They-- It came up during the political election, right? Because we had a female candidate f- running for office.

She was like, she was annoyed with the industry in general because she would be going on press tours for these movies, and they would ask her about when does she plan on having kids, and what's her favorite kind of makeup? And she was just like, "They wouldn't ask other actors this. It's just because I'm a woman."

And, s- she's got a point

Yeah. Yeah. And we've talked a little bit trying to do some of the local stuff. We haven't got it rolling yet. And we were more interested in how much fun it would be to do the fight scenes, regardless if you're a man or woman we didn't care, so I think the industry in general is fighting against that, but it's a hard, slow thing to change

Yeah, because the industry can only control so much. This is happening on a press tour where they're out there talking to, independent journalists who can ask whatever the hell they want and

A- and there's also veering off here a second, there's also very much something to be said of doing what people expect, 'cause when you go outside that, then it looks like, "Oh that's weird. That's not quite right." And it, as a journalist I'm not gonna listen to them again.

I'm not gonna read their stuff again. And, you lose that credibility. So it's a battle. You wanna do something different, but if y- I hear this with stories all the time. Why do you think every freaking Hallmark movie has the same template? 'Cause that's what people want.

Yeah. I was, I walked out in the living room the other day and Price was watching a YouTuber who was basically doing this with Hallmark movies.

I can see that

But just ripping them apart. Like every episode it was like, "Okay, we're gonna watch the Dog That Saved Christmas." And it would just be like just ridiculous stuff.

Yeah, they very much, 90% of them definitely follow the same template. Like the same beats in the same order, same type of scenes. You could literally predict it and write one, just drop different names and settings in

Yeah. So she's a method actor. When she got the role, she went and lived alone for three months. She would swaddle herself in bandages, and she got two pet cockroaches to work with because she knew cockroaches were gonna be part of the thing and she wanted to be comfortable with them. She tried to train one of them to crawl into her mouth because there's a scene in the movie where the cockroach crawls in her mouth, but it wouldn't do it.

It would climb on her face. But it became a thing on set. People would bet euro about whether or not members of the crew could get the cockroach to climb in their mouth, and apparently there was a lighting technician who earned 50 euro that way by getting the cockroach to climb into his mouth,

all right. Some of these backstories are even more amazing for this movie, I must tell you.

The kids loved them, the cockroaches. But Ver says this is a painful, scary movie to watch. Any time that she's gone back to see it, she's only ever lasted about 30 minutes and then stops. Which I can imagine, especially if, you were in it,

Yeah

But she had been working… This is funny. She had been working with Peter Kern, who is the controversial director that France and Fiala did the documentary about.

And so they were all together at this dinner, and Veronica suggested to her that she should do a horror movie, and she's write me a script then." Just being flippant and, funny. A year later, they came back with a script.

Funny you should say

Yeah. And they only told her, about the film, and they wouldn't give her the script until shooting began.

They were like, "So here's what the story's gonna be, but no, you don't get to read it until we actually start filming," so

Wow. And, that's one of the things in our modern day, especially with horror, that I really like, is you can get these type of movies out there. That there's more acceptance of it, more people looking for them. We di- we're diving a little bit into local thing, and it's amazing the number of people that look for local small indie movies and wanna watch them.

Good, bad, whatever. It's just "I gotta see them all," type thing. So it's good that there's that chance of doing this that didn't exist so much before. Actually, horror movies have always been a lot independent. They've needed to be, but there's more acceptance and more of them getting out now. Tubi is wonderful for that.

Yeah. But, even back in the day, like in our youth, there was a barrier to entry just from the cost of the equipment and the actual production of the film. Exposure and all that stuff. You had to get the film processed, which you don't have to do anymore. But that's why in X they're like, "You know what?

If you wanna actually successfully ma- guarantee yourself a movie, make a porno movie back then." 'Cause all you had to do was make it, and there would be plenty of people who'd be willing to produce it and distribute it for you.

After viewing it to make sure it was good.

Yeah, of course

A- and now people there was a movie just recently made completely on an iPhone, if I remember right, that got released somewhere.

Actually, I had suggested that for our horror fest

Oh, is that where I heard about it?

in an earlier movie and we can't find it anywhere

'Cause it, yeah. Okay. That's right. I knew I heard it somewhere

Yeah. They had a cockroach wrangler on set.

Back to the movie.

he said that no matter where you are, there can always be cockroaches found. He's "You can be in the most upclass, fanciest hotel and there are still cockroaches there. You just need to know where to look for them."

That's fine. I don't really need to. That's okay. Especially if they're this damn big

Yeah. But France and Fiala were like, "Hey, you know what? That's this symbol for this ugliness that crawls underneath that you can't really see, but it's still there." So they embraced it and used it as a symbol throughout the movie

Yeah. Okay. Good

This also has reference to an actual psychological issue.

It's called Capgras syndrome, and it is basically where you have somebody who just has someone they know and they suddenly become convinced that person has been replaced with something else. And it's like a legitimate problem because there's this core belief that the person has been swapped out, and typically the reaction to that is fear, anger, suspicion, aggressive behavior towards the imposter and it's really hard to break that.

I didn't see that.

They go through and they're like it could be, like, brain damage that caused it or it could be some sort of emotional or emotional issue, schizophrenia or dementia that's causing this problem." But if you can't medicate it away, you basically just have to take the person who's suffering from it and teach them to accept it.

Wow "

Yes, you think this person is not who they are, but they are, and here are some mental gymnastics you will have to go through just to make sure that you don't hurt them."

So here's the problem with that. What if they're actually right?

Yeah

How would you actually prove it? But what if they are right? I'm I can't say I, I would be 100% believing that of every case that's ever come about of this or someone believing, I can't say that 100% of them have been false, the person wasn't replaced. I know there's gotta be some even mi- minuscule percentage of people that they actually got replaced, but the person who said so was the one thought crazy.

I don't know which, what they are, who they are or whatever, but, I just can't believe that it's never happened.

So that's the fun part about how they shot this one. Because I mentioned before they shot it from the kids' perspective. And so yeah you figure out what's going on pretty early on, especially if you've been watching a lot of movies like this, right?

But there are times throughout the movie where you're like, "Wait, may- maybe they're actually onto something."

And it's really interesting now I'm thinking about it, because if you watch The Lodge That is shot from the woman's perspective. It's still a very similar film. It's just from the woman's perspective where the kids, are they a threat? No, they couldn't possibly be a threat. Wait, yes they are. No, I'm being ridiculous kind of thing.

And here it's, with the kids it's "Our mother's a monster." "Yeah, she's a monster." She still looks like my mom." No, she's… Trust me, she's a monster," kind of thing. It's a very different way of looking at the situation

Or Nicole Kidman's "The Others," based on Ja- "The Turn of the Screw."

Yeah so I think we'll go ahead and start talking about the movie. If you haven't seen it, you should definitely in this case stop and watch the movie before we start talking about it

So Mike, pause the podcast and watch it when you get into a truck stop or something tonight.

There you go. The movie opens with this scene from Wolfgang Liebeneiner's Die Trapp Familie, which was a 1956 German film that was the inspiration for The Sound of Music

Yeah, except this one looked creepy

Yeah. And so I did a little dive on Wolfgang Liebeneiner, and a dark past because he's a German director who was a German director in Germany throughout 1930s and '40s.

A lot of his films were just like eugenics propaganda for the Nazi Party, which is

That's probably why they didn't show this whole thing in just that small little clip. It

Yeah

be a completely different movie than what we're used to

They are singing Guten Abend, Good Night, Gute Nacht, which is Brahms' Lullaby. And there's this kind of isolation with the whole thing because in this scene you have the woman singing and all the kids around her, and then a kid climbs up on her, and the camera and the lighting just cones down just on her, and you're like, "This is just kinda creepy."

And the story, again, in the story she is seen as a mother figure, but she's not their mother,

Which kinda lends itself to the film.

It was a good choice. And it was creepy. I figured it was an actual real movie and not just something filmed for this thing. And I was like, "Wow, that is the creepiest version of this movie I think ever."

It predates the actual… There was an actual woman who is the Julie Andrews of the Von Trapp thing, and Hollywood was dying to get ahold of her story, the rights to it. But they just wanted her name and kind of the story and to write their own thing. In Germany, they were like, "No, we'll tell your story how you want it told."

And so that's who she sold the rights to.

Interesting

So they came out with their version first, and it was such a big hit that Hollywood's "Okay, we'll just go ahead and we'll just remake this if that's okay with you." And they were like, "Yeah, okay. That's fine now

Yeah, so Rodgers and Hammerstein saw this really creepy movie and said, "Wow, we can make that a fun musical."

It was actually an actress who saw it first and was so excited by it, they took it to Rodgers and Hammerstein and said, "Hey, you guys gotta do this." So yeah. Now we cut to a scene from Children of the Corn. You just have this boy running through the corn. It's Elias. He's looking over his shoulder as though he's being chased.

And then he just gets taken out on the right-hand side by his identical twin brother, who's wearing a dragon mask made of papier-mâché and cardboard.

Yeah

A- and it turns out it's it's like a kind of version of tag. Because now that he's got his brother, he takes the mask off, gives it to his brother, and then he takes off, and his brother takes off to chase him

And the very first thing here-- So first of all, they made physical contact,

Oh,

which is an interesting thing to discuss after you see the whole movie. But also there, the very beginning of the filming, it made it look like there was only one boy running, and then suddenly there were two. So there were a couple scenes that type of thing happened which makes you question it a lot.

That was done very well. And I had to rewind it and look at it. I'm like no, yeah, it looks like there's one." And now suddenly there's two. So yeah, it does make you question it

Yeah. They're walking around. They're just pl- they're being boys, playing around outside.

But very silently and creepy like.

Yeah.

It was definitely weird

Like Lucas finds this tunnel and, it looks like a drain tunnel or something like that. He goes in and Elias hangs back. You can tell Elias is a little more of the reserved one, and then he follows him into the tunnel. Then you have Elias on a pond. A lot of the opening is them counting in German, because you always have to give someone a head start, so they're counting.

And Elias is on a po- on this raft over the pond. He calls out for Lucas. And then the screen goes black and you have Ixey, Ixey show up on screen, and there you go. We're into the movie.

Another movie

Yep. And this is what I really enjoyed that… you f- of course will know why I love this, but they have a shot of this very modernist, not like modern, modernist, the style,

50-ish looking to me

It's in this obvious remo- remote location, and what I loved about it is you can see the house is here. On the left is the cornfield they were just playing in, and in the front of it is the pond they were just playing in, and behind it to the right, there's the forest they were just playing in. So now, my map-obsessed brain can now chart out exactly where everything is, which I appreciate very much

Yeah. And it's, it is definitely a weird house inside. There's steps like break and stuff like that. And y- and even though the map thing, like you said, it was weird trying to figure out where some of the rooms were. It was like they had this one side with all hallway and then every room was over here almost

So I don't know if you've ever done this. My wife and I do this frequently. We will go and find bizarre Airbnbs to stay in, and that's the whole trip. It's not like there's anything else we wanna see. We were in Kentucky and found like a Theodore Roosevelt cabin, which literally was, like, the size of a closet in the middle of this giant, amazing state forest with a hot tub on the side of it, and you're like, "This is kinda cool." This place reminds me more of a bizarre Airbnb that I would wanna rent than a house I would wanna live in.

Yeah, definitely.

It would be cool for a week, and then after that it's just what's with these swinging chairs that are hanging from the

Yes.

This is

The Jetsons.

The one that was really freaky to me was the hunting lodge one, and he had 56 deer heads hanging up throughout the whole place even the room you stayed in and looking down over you. Couple of them were battling with the arrows through the horns and stuff. Yeah

Nice. The, a car is coming down the driveway, the horn honks, and the boys come r- running in through a sliding glass door calling for their mother. They run upstairs and find her in her room drawing the blinds. Her face is completely bandaged from neck to the top of her head, and it's a heavy bandaging.

She turns and the lighting is so that she almost looks like some kind of clown mask kind of thing,

Which is unsettling

Yeah

And she st- she approaches them with her arms outstretched, but the boys seem a little startled, and she's this is a fine greeting." Then she's "Your clothes are filthy.

Go take them off." They start to take them off right there. She's "Not here, you moron. Z- put it in the washer and take a shower

So the, they don't explain why she's got the bandages on, and even throughout the movie it's only kinda hinted at. But it's interesting, it's like she just got there and the kids hadn't seen her before type thing, so

Yeah, that was my take

yeah, but it was like they were calling for her, they knew she was there, but what, did she like wrap herself in these bandages and had just walked through the door?

It was not the way you would expect that scene to play out

It's true. There's a divorce involved. Their father does not live there. I- the way I took it was they had been with their father during this whole procedure and he came and dropped them off because she was coming back.

Something

and they beat her there, but

Yeah. It, you just don't know though

You cut to the boys in the tub and they're messing about like brothers would in a tub. They've got these wash clov- cloth gloves on, and they're just basically boxing with each other in the bathtub

Yeah.

Mom's making a drink, like Kool-Aid kind of thing. She pours one glass and gives it to Elias. And Lucas whispers to him saying he wants one too.

And Elias tells her that, and she's "If Eli- if Lucas wants one, he can ask for it himself

So you start getting this picture of a very disciplinarian mother that's mad because the one kid did something. But it still seems stilted in its delivery. So I'm saying that it was done well making you question which direction this is going

And the character development as we go on, she is a disciplinarian. And so it

But not for the reasons you think,

Yeah. But again, this is from the kids' perspective,

Right

so even if you're not a real strict disciplinarian, your kids are gonna be like, "Man, my dad just laid into me," she's "If he wants some, he can ask himself."

And then Elias is "You only made supper for me." And she's "You know why." And then leaves the boys to sit there awkwardly at the table. Elias shares the glass with his brother, and he tells Lucas, "You should apologize." And Lucas shakes his head no. There's obviously something going on between Lucas and the mom

Yeah, just again, not what you think

They're playing the equivalent of headbands on the couch where you write something on a Post-it and you stick it on your head. Elias is guessing first. It turns out he was a car. That was what was on his head. But now we get this kind of… We get a, like a trickle of information fed to us. It's not any kind of info dump because Elias writes mama on the Post-it and puts it on his mother's head, and we find out from her guessing and their answers that she was a semi-famous television host in Austria who liked animals.

But she never does guess it. She just gets frustrated with the whole thing

Yeah, and I love that scene for all of that the way it was done

Then they were playing oh, it's night, and one of the boys is in there playing with the blinds. And from the outside it almost looks like a Cephalomor thing, right? Where it's like light and then dark. And in the window the way the architecture is, the boy looks super tiny as he's standing to the side doing that because the window's 20 feet.

Eh, a lot of glass, and the kid is just, he's a kid, But they're sitting there playing some kind of matching game over on the couch at the coffee table, so

and unlike most parents, the mother doesn't even seem to really notice or get annoyed by it, which is a little unusual

Yeah. And especially when you see her reaction to stuff, you're like, "Why do some things bother her and other

Yes. Yeah. So they, it was well thought out again what they did

Elias is performing good oral hygiene. He's brushing his teeth. He's flossing. There's a timer keeping track of it. He notes that there's a giant cockroach on the wall which is one of two things. Either one, they're, have pet cockroaches, or two, the directors are idiots and don't know that Madagascar hissing cockroaches don't, aren't indigenous to Austria

Yeah, they're probably imported, so it's an escapee

There you go. Lucas comes in and brushes his teeth, and Elias catches the cockroach and puts it into a giant tank full of cockroaches. So

A- and here's another very subtle hint you gotta pay attention to. They share the toothbrush. There's only one toothbrush. So then it's a qui- well, I can't believe the mother's that much of a disciplinarian that she took the toothbrush away. Again, some of this stuff you really gotta pay attention to 'cause it's filmed very subtly

Yeah. Like I, that never even crossed my mind that they were using one toothbrush. But,

Yeah

But they had done this in the film purposely, and kudos to the kids. They decided in an effort to help the audience know who was who, Elias would be left-handed

Oh, that I didn't notice

So whenever you're watching the kids, if they're doing stuff with their left hand, it's Elias.

If they're doing stuff with their right hand, it's Lucas.

Interesting. I I like that

Yeah. They're sitting there in their room playing a video game. They get busted by their mom. They're like, "Yeah, Dad lets us do it," and she doesn't care. She takes the device and she wants to have this serious conversation with them. And so Elias is looking at her as asked.

Lucas is not. He's pouting, looking the other direction. She's "The doctor says I need rest. If you need to come to my room, you knock. The house has to be quiet. No visitors. Keep the blinds closed 'cause the sun's bad for me. Play outside. I need to sleep."

She's a vampire

Elias grabs these seashells for her, f- that they have for her, like a gift.

She-- From him and Lucas. She takes one of them, and she's dismissive of the whole thing. End scene

Yeah. And when she took the one I was questioning did he have two to hand her? Did she only see one or was she being a bitch?

After, again, kid's perspective, after she lays down this whole list of rules about how you can't disturb her, it tends towards the latter there about her being a bitch, but

Yeah. They do push you, but, there's that question still. Again, a lot of these scenes are like that

The boys are comparing notes in the dark. "She's so different." And then Eliza's "It's just the operation." And he's "I don't know. She's not like our mom." And they have a recording of her verbally tucking them in at a period of time when she wouldn't be around while they were going to bed, and they play that and fall asleep to it Now we hear this.

We're in a darkened room. Elias hears this noise, and he silently heads out to investigate. This is one of the trailer scenes. He gets to the bathroom, and he looks in the bathroom to see his mother applying cream to her face, and her back is to us. He backs up and the door creaks, and she looks in the mirror, and it's like a magnification mirror, and you get a big zoom-in of her eye, and she's got busted blood vessels in her eye.

And he takes ba- takes off back to his room, and then she comes storming into the room, opens the door, and he's just hiding. She doesn't see him, and then she just closes the door and goes away

Yeah, I love the hiding. He's like right next to the door. She doesn't look

The next day it's pouring outside and the boys just go out and start playing, and then it turns to hail.

They don't care. They're throwing hail at each other. They're jumping on the trampoline with it bouncing all over the place.

Which is very fun actually

Yeah. They do come in and they're sitting in those weird floaty egg chairs, and they're having a burping contest with each other. The doorbell rings and they're supposed to tell everyone their mother's sick.

But Elias goes up to get his mom, and he knocks on her door and she doesn't answer. So he opens it up and finds her lying in bed asleep. And he tries to wake her, but she doesn't wake up, so he leaves, and it turns out she's faking the whole time. She opens her eyes once he closes the door, and she starts to chew.

She's chewing something crunchy, and she has a cookie that she had hidden under the blankets

A- and I was questioning, still at this point, was she really faking it or did she not even know he wa- came in? That which, you know it just, questionable of the things going on at the time with knowledge

I agree with you there. But he opened the door with his left hand, so it was Elias who opened the door.

got it

He goes to find Lucas. He's down in the basement. And there's this guy down there, a delivery guy who's loading up the freezer with convenience foods, a lot of frozen pepperoni pizzas. And he's trying to make conversation, and the kids just don't really feel the need to talk to him, so

And I was like, and this, another one I was questioning, so did the kids order all this pizza unbeknownst to the mother? I was wondering why exactly she would've ordered all the pizzas or the kids did it without her knowing

I'm assuming she ordered it because she's not gonna feel like cooking.

Yeah. A-agreed

bunch of stuff they could just make themselves.

But it, being almost all pizzas, it sounded more like the kids did it to me

They go back out to the trampoline. Mom's watching them from upstairs. Then she heads over to the mirror to inspect her scars from her surgery under her breasts and stuff. So she had not just facial work done, she just had a lot of work done

So it wasn't just cosmetic to change my look because I'm hiding out from the mob or something. But I also started to wonder too around this point i- does the mother suspect that these aren't her kids? You kinda got that perspective going on a little bit too. We're being forced seeing it from the kids' perspective, but the mother's reaction almost made it seem like she thinks she's got a changeling in the house or something.

But from the kids' perspective, if she is a stranger pretending to be their mother, she would be surprised. She wouldn't know anything about the kids

A-a-again it's a simple story plot. There's not a lot of things happening throughout the movie. It's all the same, but it definitely makes it open to multiple interpretations

Yeah. There's some bouncing back and forth in the next scene where the boys are playing outside with this combine. There's a farmer nearby apparently. They're, like, following the combine, sucking in a bunch of wheat chaff dust. The mother's upstairs trying on these chiffon-style dresses in the mirror, I think just in an effort to try and see what she's gonna look like when she's done with all of this because it's a big change for her apparently. The boys are out playing in a field. It turns out it's a graveyard, and there's this small access door that leads under the graves into this whole tomb full of bones and skulls. And there's a noise in there, and they go in to investigate and find this mangy-looking cat that sought shelter in there.

And Y- it's a safe bet they're gonna take the cat. We come back to the mother. She's taken off her bandages, but she hears the boys coming and she puts them back on. And now when they find her, she's there with the bandages, but she's only got a single layer on. So the amount of covering between her and the boys is now cut in half.

You can see through the gauze

They brought the cat home and they put it in a box in their room and they're feeding it, I think it was a sausage maybe.

I don't know

It was weird. The mother comes by and finds the door locked, and she is not happy about that. She bitches at them for that and then starts to search the room immediately.

She finds an empty Coke bottle, which she's disgusted by, and then she finds a lighter and she's "Why is there a lighter in here?" And Elias said, "I just wanted to burn some books," which is hilarious

Especially when you said that about the history of the everything going on that yeah, that even got funnier. Yes

Yeah. She starts to get close to where they've hidden the cat who left the box while the mother was searching around, so the cat's not even there. Nobody knows that. And Elias…

cat too

Yeah. Elias, in an effort to distract her, claps his fa- hands right in front of her face, like twice.

Then she just like proceeds to pin him on the bed, and Lucas is up on the top bunk yelling to let him go, and then she just gets up, leaves, slams the door, comes back to take the key so they can't lock their door anymore, and then slams it again and wa- storms off

Yeah. A weird scene as of what actually was going on there

Yeah. The brothers are hanging out in this kind of dusky twilight on the balcony upstairs, and they watch as their mother walks across the yard and disappears into the forest. And she's walking through… the camera's following her through the trees, and as she goes, she's peeling off her clothes, her bandages, until she's just walking through the forest totally naked among the trees, and she stops, staring out in the distance.

And then she rolls her neck, and then her head starts to just do that rapid vibration shake thing it's all a big blur. And then it cuts to the boys lying in bed. And you're like, "Did that just really happen, or was that a dream?"

Yeah and whose dream was it actually?

Lucas pulls out this cockroach from the case and the boys creep down the hall. They sneak into their mother's room as she's sleeping and they put the roach on her chest, and it climbs around up onto her face and then down into her mouth, and she doesn't seem to wake up

N- yeah, it has like a puppy dog sized cockroach. It's dang.

Woof the next day the house seems to be empty as they're going from room to room, but someone's playing Brahms downstairs on the piano. Mom's walking around outside and the camera pans around and we see Elias is playing the piano. And Mom is cleaning the outside wall as Lucas is burning bugs with a magnifying glass

A- and again, only one of the boys was practicing.

Yes

The other is ignored

Both boys end up on the couch looking through this old photo album. They find what seems to be a picture of their mom with maybe her twin.

Yeah

They take the picture out of the th- out of there, and then they go to the laptop. They take the laptop off the kitchen table, which apparently they're not supposed to be looking at 'cause they're looking over their shoulders very nervously.

Yes.

They do a Google search for their mother and find out that the house they are in is for sale

Which, which made me think once again of the Nicole Kidman, "The Others," you know?

Oh yeah,

yeah, the mother's was in an accident. She's hurt, but she's bandaged. Or is she?

There's predominant pictures throughout the house too that show women that are blurred.

And it's a very striking thing for this situation where the definition of the woman in this movie is questionable, just like the blurry pictures hanging on the wall

Yeah. And those were very avant-garde type pictures. They were weird

1980s Duran looking kind of thing.

yes, without the movement

Yes. They're knocking on her door. They find that she's not in her room, so they sneak in and put a baby monitor under her bed, which I thought was pretty clever.

Yeah, but what are they still doing with a baby monitor?

I think if you looked around here, we probably have three somewhere

true, but you used yours over how many years? This was twins that they, at the same time, so

She comes back in the room and Elias dives under the bed. She drops some stuff, and it's this big tension-filled thing. She reaches down and picks it up and then leaves. We're like, "Where did Lukas go?" He went out the sliding glass door, so he's standing out on her balcony,

Supposedly

supposedly. They run back to the room where they can't find their cat, who they have named Leg. Maybe in German that means something different,

Yeah, bad translation maybe

So their mother yells up it's time for chores. Elias goes down and runs the sweeper while Lukas runs around looking for the cat

That, that is the weirdest sweeper too. It was like five feet tall

Yeah. It's very old school where you have the canister on one side and then the hose and the handle on the other. The phone rings and Elias turns off the sweeper so he can hear her talk, and she's saying she's done playing around and he has to face it. And my first thought was she was talking about her husband, her ex.

But we do find out she's actually talking about Elias.

She seems to note that the sweeper's off and might be coming back, so he turns it back on. She retreats to another door, another room, and then locks herself in so she can't be disturbed. And then the boys just leave the sweeper running in the living room and continue looking for Leg They find him in the basement.

He's not well. And honestly, if you find a cat hanging out in a tomb, secluded tomb somewhere far away, chances are it went there to die anyways. But Lucas is sure it was their mother that killed it. So they have this kind of candlelit vigil with the cat as it slowly passes away. Then they load up all the cockroaches into jars, and they empty the tank and fill it with water and put the dead cat on it, put the whole thing on the coffee table.

This is like a passive-aggressive statement "How dare you kill our cat?"

Yeah. It was, that was the first really bizarre thing that made you think, "Wow, these, some of these kids are mentally not quite right. Maybe there's something going on other than what they're making us believe."

So they're hiding behind this curtain watching her reaction. She comes in, and it's not like she can't tell that they're there, but she wants them to come out. So she grabs one of the jars of roaches and starts dumping them into the water. And she's "How's that? You like that? How about that?" Then eventually Elias comes out from hiding.

He's "What are you doing?" And she's "What in the world is going on?" And he's "We want our mom back." "Have you lost your mind?" And she tells him to clean this up and go to his room. And he's "You're not my mom." And so she slaps him in the face. And Lucas is "Tell her to show us her birthmark."

And so Elias does, and when he does, she just strong-arms him right out of the room, takes him upstairs, and locks him in his own bedroom

So it ma- making you think she's really trying to hide she's not their mother or whatever. But I also took it maybe one of those surgical scars removed the b- birthmark. She couldn't show them

It turns out when we get there eventually, that did happen in certain places.

Right

Lucas is locked in his room, or Lucas is locked out of his room while his mother's in there with Elias, and she can hear him. She demands he repeat 10 times that she is his mother, and she's "I'm done playing around.

There will only be one set of clothes, one breakfast, and you're not to talk about your brother." And he's, he won't do it. And so she slaps him again, and then she takes his cellphone. And then as soon as she opens the door, Lucas dashes in, and she slams it shut and walks off. And then Lucas is there trying to console Elias, and he's "She wants to tear us apart." In the meantime, the mother's sitting on her bed with no one to comfort her, and she's just sitting there sobbing too. It is traumatic for both parties.

At least Elias has Lucas to keep him company

Yeah, in his own head

So now the boys are in their room. They're, like, starting to gear up. You can tell they're starting to gear up. They start to hit each other to see if it hurts. "Does that hurt?" "No." "Does that hurt? Does that hurt?" And you get this kind of Home Alone action going on as they take their suction cup crossbow and they take tips off the suction cups off and then sharpen the wood down to little spikes or Buffy the Vampire Slayer kind of thing

Yeah. Very disturbing scene

Yeah. They hear their mother coming and they try to keep the door closed, but they didn't have to worry. She was just coming to lock them in. They can't get out now. They've arranged a shrine and Eli- a shrine for their mother, and Elias is kneeling before it. It's a picture of their mother and there's candles, and he's "I want you back.

I'll do whatever, just please come back."

Yeah, I was waiting for him to make a pentagram on the ground

And he's peeing in a jar. sense. If you're locked in your room

Yeah, when I used to sit on the Commodore all the time, my mother got me a survival kit 'cause I'd never leave the room

A bucket.

They have a baby monitor and they're taking turns sitting, watching the door, baby monitor, crossbow They set a timer, so Lucas is watching while Elias sleeps. And then there's this cool shot of this star light that like shines down across the room and then it lands on the altar, and then it…

as it goes past, all the candles go out on the altar, which is just kinda creepy.

Yeah. Y- yeah

it's Elias's turn to guard. He's not very good 'cause he falls asleep He wakes up to s-

Lucas didn't.

Correct, Lucas did not

you gotta wonder

Elias wakes up to see the door is wide open. Lucas is gone. He goes to his room and finds Lucas standing there with a utility knife, and he walks over and mom's asleep.

He cuts her belly open and all the roaches crawl out. And that was just a dream

Yeah. Thank God. Wouldn't want anything horrific like that happening

Correct. They barricade the door with books and stuff, and they've cut their hair so they look even more identical to each other as they were

Which I liked that 'cause oh, wait a second, one of them kept getting growing, the other hasn't. I was like, oh, that again, very subtle. You have to think about what's going on

Yeah. Elias is still left-handed and Lucas is right-handed. That's not gonna change. But she knocks and she says she's sorry. She's not mad anymore. Are they friends? And she comes in with her bandages off, and she does look uncanny valley.

Yes

Yeah a little bit fake. She asks how they compare, how she looks, and they compare her to a photograph on the shrine.

And she's "Are we friends?" And they agree, and she gives them a boomerang, and they're like, "Can we go outside and try it?" And she's "Okay." And this is the crazy part. She goes and opens the door, and they just bolt. If they would've just walked out to play in the yard, there wouldn't be all the drama.

But they bolt out the door, and she calls after them. They instantly head into the woods

Yeah. Yeah, a- again, good choices on what they, had the kids doing stuff to make things unsettling

Yeah. Cut to the farmer. He's burning off his field. The boys are out there and he's yelling at them like, "Get out of here, you're gonna catch fire." We don't get to hear it, so they go back to… He goes back to what he was doing once they leave, 'cause he doesn't care what's going on, he just doesn't want them there.

And they follow these train tracks into a village, which seems completely empty short of one guy walking down the street playing an accordion and singing horribly

Yeah. Very it, he- Pennywise-like here going on

Yeah, it was a very surreal scene. They head to the church, which I thought was an interesting choice. The other thing that I found interesting is when they go in, Elias just walks in like it's no big deal. Lucas walks in, does the holy water, crosses himself, and then proceeds to enter in. He's apparently much more spiritual than his brother.

That's crazy. Okay

They find this guy sweeping and he's "Can I help you?" And they're like, "Are you the priest?" He's "No, I'm the sexton." And can you call the priest?" And he's "Okay." "What you find, the priest?" I'm like, "Dude, off. What are you doing?" So the priest has them in the car and they're like, "Can you go into the police station with us and help us explain it?"

And he's "Yeah, we'll… Yeah, it's fine." And he's driving along. It gets dark and this storm blows in. We're reaching that dramatic part of the film. And it turns out he's driven them back to their house. so he goes out to talk

So they never actually had the kids say where they live, so the priest knew that

Yeah. Their mom was a television

Oh, that's true. Yeah

He goes out to talk to her and they lock themselves in the car, forgetting that he has a key. So he does get the door open, then they bolt inside on their… bolt right past their mom into the house. And he's "Do you wanna explain this?"

And she's "It was all a bit much, the accident and the separation." And again, you can have two different meanings there. The accident could've been something that resulted in her getting surgeries, or the accident could be something else that happened. The separation is obviously the divorce.

I took it as, yes. Okay.

while they're talking the light on the porch goes out. So she comes back in and locks the door, and as she's moving through the house, she's locking every door as she goes. She climb-

there's a lot of things she does that seem very crazy

Oh yeah, I don't think she's necessarily sane. At least again, kid's perspective

She's she climbs the stairs, checks her bedroom. There's no one there. They've just gone into hiding in the house somewhere. So alone, she sits with tears on her face and takes a pill and lies down and cries, and now she's sound asleep. The boys come out of hiding in the dark. There's a lot of clinking and noises, and we cut to the mom as they open the curtains.

She's lying there on the bed, and Elias is there with his mask on, and she finds she has been tied to the bed

Yeah, that was a heavy sleep. I figured she took something to help her sleep

Yeah. Lucas is in there wearing a mask too, and they wanna know where their mother is. Now, just to go back to Steve's little hints they're both wearing the exact same mask, which if it is a papier-mâché cardboard crafted mask, it would be really difficult to make them look that identical.

Yeah

An art department, sure.

Two nine-year-olds, probably not

I couldn't have even done it myself

So she's tied up. She's "How do I get up?" "You don't. Where's our mother?" And then Elias repeats, "Lucas said, 'Where's our mother?'" they contin- continue to demand where their mother is, and she's "I'm your mother." They're like, "Nope." And they hold up the photograph of her with what looks like her twin, and they're like, "Who's this?"

She's "It was a friend of mine we used to like to dress alike." And then her phone rings, and she asks them to answer it, and they walk off with the phone. They have what looks like an audition video of her on the, up on the computer they're looking at, and they note something about it, and they come in and they're like, "In that video, your eyes were brown, but your eyes are blue."

'Cause they go poking about her eyes, and she's "I was wearing contacts. They're in the bathroom." So Elias goes into the bathroom to check, and Lucas comes in and he's "What are you doing? We agreed to not believe anything she says." And Elias is like, "I changed my mind

S- so I, I'm starting to pick up like Lucas is like the evil one and he's pushing his brother to be evil. That, that's what I started getting here. Or is the mother really just lying about everything and they're right?

Yeah. They start fighting while she's

the first time. That's the first real disagreement they've had

Yeah. Oh, for sure. First source of tension between them.

Yeah

They start fighting each other. She's struggling to f- free herself. They end up sitting in front of the tub, both of them with bloody noses she's calling for help. She's demanding scissors. Elias comes in and dumps a glass of water on her face, which seems to shock her. He then calls out to Lucas, who doesn't follow him into the room, and she convinces him to sit on the bed and talk. She's "You know I'm your mom. Just get the scissors and cut me loose. Nothing bad's happened." He pulls out this phone and plays this video back to her of… that she recorded of her telling him, demanding that he refuse to listen to Lucas. He's "Our mother wouldn't do that." Which, could be a valid point, because before the surgery, their mother wouldn't do that.

But then he's starting to feel bad, so he starts to wipe the water off of her. She asks what happened to his nose. She says, "Cut me loose and I'll make breakfast."

Which, right there would be enough for me to cut her loose. I'm like, "Okay, let's get breakfast."

You're easy

She convinces him to cut her feet loose, and he does one side, and then Lucas shows up and points out that in the videos she had a mole, and the mole on her face is fake. And this is one of those times when it's holy shit, they've been right this whole time, because the mole does, it wipes off. But she's "No, it was dangerous. They had to remove it at the hospital." And I'm like, "Oh, okay. Skin cancer. I get it." So but then Elias hits her and calls her a liar And then there's the shot downstairs where she's crying for them to stop, they come back, they have strapped her head in place.

It's one of those scenes where she's crying, asking for them to stop. It's a scene away from the bed. They have her head strapped in place, and they're burning her cheek with a magnifying glass

Like the ants or the insects

demanding to know where their mother is. And Lucas seems to be into this, but Elias not so much. He goes and comes back with some tape.

He puts some cream on the burn, puts tape over her mouth, and tapes her mouth shut. They go outside to an outside altar, and like the church experience, like Lucas is sitting up properly with his hands folded, and Elias is just slumped there, and Lucas convinces him to get into this, and they pray for their mother to come back. Then the Red Cross shows up with probably the two most pushy door-to-door salespeople ever.

Then we'll sit here and wait. What?

they're seeking donations. They come up, the door's unlocked, so they just help themselves into the house. In the United States, you're probably getting shot now

Yeah exactly. E- even if it was just two nine-year-olds at home, you'd probably get shot

That's true. They come in, the mom's trying to make noise. They're old, they're not really hearing it, but they start to head upstairs thinking she might be up there. Again, what an invasion of someone's privacy. The boys show up and they're like, "Oh, hey." And they're like, "Is your mom home?" And they're like, "No."

And they're like, "Can we… When she gonna be back?" And they're like, "Soon." And then she's whoa, wait." And then you have this awkward thing where Elias is sitting at a table, they're sitting at a table, Lucas is off to the side and they're trying to make small talk

Now the only reason I, other than walking around the house, the only reason I can think that they'd wait is being an actress or whatever, they've been here before and she has, gives a sizable donation. It's worth the time to hang out. But other than that, it was, again, not the expected reactions from anybody, and creepy

Yeah. Elias is just like, "You know what?" He goes through her purse, grabs a big fat ca- wad of cash and just gives it to them. They're like, "Are you sure?" He's "Yeah, we do it all the time." And the old guy's "Oh, you can see by the house they're rich. They, she won't miss this." And I'm like, what kind of charity is this?

Yeah

gonna get a charitable donation. We're just gonna rob you

I'm gonna take some of these spoons while I'm at it

Yeah. The mom does get the tape off her mouth just a second or two too late 'cause they're already outside. She's trying to s- scream, so they go upstairs and superglue her mouth shut.

Yeah, that's the right choice

Yes. And now they go down to the tool bench in the basement, which is starting to get terrifying, honestly. I'm gonna get medieval on our asses here. They're eating pepperoni, feeding some to the roaches. Elias is eating pepperoni, feeding some to the roaches. He's made some for her

Good

But she can't eat it 'cause her mouth's super glued shut. They try to force it open, which it's not going to. So they go in very delicately with cuticle scissors

Yeah. Again little kids, what choice would they make to do that,

yeah. And guess what? It doesn't go well. They screw up and blood starts spraying everywhere. She opens her mouth 'cause she's screaming in pain. Elias looks like he's about to cry, and Lucas just looks angry.

Yeah, I did like how the boys were different

Yes. Elias is like, "Please just prove to me you're our mom." And so he's "What's Lucas's favorite song?" And she says, "Lullaby and Good Night," which is the Brahms piece. And that's the wrong answer, because they tape her mouth back up. And they proceed to sing Lucas's favorite song, which is everyone's favorite child Christian hymn, Y- Can You Count the Stars?

Yeah. But they sing it very creepy too

Yeah, it's a very esoteric song too. God knows everything. Can you? No. But you know what? He knows all the stars. He knows all the sand. He knows everything about you. He's always watching you. It's that overseeing eye kind of perspective on God, "where's our mother?" She doesn't answer.

So there's a timer. When she doesn't answer, they force her mouth open and I'm us- assuming it was dental floss or fishing line. I'm assuming they flushed a tooth out

yeah. I was like, "Wow these kids are very disturbing. It's 'Lord of the Flies' time."

This is where the movie's just not pleasant

Good way of putting it, yeah

So they're like, "You've wet your pants. This is disgusting." So they're gonna untie her. Lucas is holding the crossbow on her. And you need to change the bedding 'cause you're gross. So she gets up, and then she takes the bedding and just throws it at them and then takes off.

Her at this point.

oh no, not at all

by now I don't have a son left anymore because he's going away. I need to survive

Yeah. She runs down and tries the front door. It doesn't, it's locked 'cause they're not that stupid. But then she goes and finds a sliding glass door open out onto the patio, runs out, trips, and a very disturbing crunch sound when her face, like no hands, like her face comes down on the stone

Yeah, that was disturbing to watch. And then the sound effects added was very good

Yep. There's this scene of, like from her perspective of being drug across the floor as she's in and out of consciousness, and she wakes to find herself lying on the floor surrounded by candles. The tank with the dead cat on it is still on the coffee table. It's been replaced on the coffee table.

One of her eyes, her left eye is apparently super glued shut

Yeah, and that was disturbing even to look at

Yes. Elias is wearing the mask now, and he's taking a candle and shows us that the cat is not in a tank full of water. It is flammable liquid 'cause he puts the candle on top and it lights

Oh yeah, Big Cat Alaska

He's "Where's our mother?" And then he drops the candle on the floor. And she's "I'll play along again. I'll talk to Lu- Lucas. I'll make you both lunch. I'll set out two sets of clothes. It's not your fault, Elias, that Lucas is dead. The accident wasn't your fault."

Yeah, I'm thinking it might've been.

Lucas is there and he doesn't believe, and, obviously they don't believe her. He takes a candle to the curtains and demands she tell him what Lucas is doing. And she's "I can't see him." And Elias is like, "What is Lucas doing? My mom would know. Mom could see him." And she's "I can't. He's not really there."

And Elias goes over and takes Lucas' hand and lights the curtains on fire

I thought was interesting. Lucas can't physically do this

Yes. And then the fire causes that tank of flammable liquid to break. It splatters all across the floor, coating her. She is completely on fire at this point, who dies scream- she dies screaming Elias' name.

Cut to the fire department. They're just trying to contain it now. That house is gone.

Elias is moving through this cornfield following Lucas, and they come out on the other side, and their mother comes over and joins them singing "Can You Count the Stars?" And the camera holds on the three of them for just a beat too long. It's that it's that-- Not Maxine. It's that Pearl thing at the end

Yeah.

he's just sitting there with the camera for…

Yes. This was just a second or two too long. You're like, "Are you gonna cut? Are you gonna cut?" 'Cause they're just standing there staring into the camera, and then they cut, and cinders fly, and you roll credits

Yeah. So basically they were right and they finally got their mother back

So that's, raises the question is, was that Elias standing there with his two imaginary friends, or did Elias die in the fire and the three of them are reunited as ghosts?

That's what I took it as. Lucas was trying to get him to die to actually be with him, 'cause Lucas realized what was actually going on. Or it was all just in Elias' imagination and he, he killed them all anyway. And either way, the end result was they're all together again.

Everybody's happy. It was a very happy movie.

Yeah. Very disturbing. And Steve is right in that if you pay close attention, you're gonna know that Lucas is dead this whole time. But it doesn't take away from the impact of the film that much, really

No, not at all. And actually, even though that's what it looks like, there are plenty of openings and holes you could argue slightly other things, and I wouldn't be able to say no, that's wrong," because it's yeah, that could be. It's multiple interpretations definitely

The, when they wipe the mole off her face, I'm like, "Holy shit, they were right this whole time." And then of course she's got a reasonable explanation. I'm like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, that happens

A- and again, we don't know exactly what happened before the f- movie. Elias could have killed his brother

He could

killed his mother. And it was a car accident or something. You don't know. So again, if this movie-- If they did like another one but filmed from a different perspective, it could change how you view it completely.

That would be an interesting thing to do. The Pearl thing, but instead it's the same movie three times from three different perspectives

Someone actually put in the comments of one of the videos "Goodnight Mommy 2." And I was like, yeah, it would be… You couldn't just do a sequential what happens next, 'cause no one cares what happens next. Is Elias dead? Is he not? Who knows? That's a great ambiguous way to end it. But yeah, tell the whole thing from Lukas' perspective, as the ghost of the boy kind of thing.

That, I could see maybe doing that, but…

That would be an interesting thing

There is a slight elephant in the room. We're gonna talk about it. It has-- This is a major spoiler warning about a different movie. So if you don't wanna hear it, just stop listening now.

Chunk. Okay, there

Okay. So I was watching the videos, and horror fans can be douchebags. It happens.

And if you're into horror, you are aware, especially if you're into Asian horror, a lot of times, a lot of times Asian horror fans get a little superior in their thinking 'cause it's the better part of the genre really. That's, that's not me saying that. They'll happily tell you. In 2003, there was a Korean film by Kim Jee-woon, who did "I Saw the Devil," called "A Tale of Two Sisters."

Okay, yes

It predates this by 11 years. There are definitely similarities between "The Tale of Two Sisters" and Iksay." Because in "The Tale of Two Sisters," you have twin sisters. One has been in an insane asylum. She comes home. Her sister welcomes them. Her father has remarried. Evil stepmother. The sisters gang up and kill the stepmother.

It turns out the other sister's actually dead. So it's a very similar theme. And the comments were rife with people saying, "Oh, they just ripped off 'A Tale of Two Sisters.'" And I think they're radically different in, in tone as you're watching them. They're definitely different. One's Austrian and one's Korean, but the storytelling itself is pretty different because you have nine-year-old innocent boys, and then you have late teen girls, one of whom's been old enough to have been hospitalized and back.

And A Tale of Two Sisters is already based off of a Korean folk tale Janghwa, Hongryeonjeon, and that- that's already been adapted into several other films. So it's not like they were doing something super cutting edge and fresh and someone ripped it off. They were doing something traditional. And if you look at the two, you can say that, yeah, okay, there's like this…

it's like when we talk about The Others as a spiritual follow-up to The Innocents. They're similar, but they're not the same. And then if you really wanna get smart with the people, you can say, "No, actually, Goodnight Mommy is the spiritual inspiration of The Other," which is a movie from 1972, which is pretty much the exact same touch points of both of those movies from the 2000s.

So everyone can just sit down and settle down

I hate when people say, "Oh, they ripped it off of this." It's really? Let me just say Halloween 8 Friday the 13th 27 or whatever. Come on,

that's a great parallel too, right? Because Friday the 13th and Halloween are basically the exact same stories, but they're told in such different manners that they actually stand alone. So

a- and again, we mentioned the Hallmark movies. Hello?

There's whole channels dedicated to this

Yeah. It's okay, we made one movie in 1958, and we've just been showing it with different skins since then.

Yep.

Yeah, that-- I hate that. "Star Wars" fans are the same thing. Colin always said, "The only people I won't talk 'Star Wars' with at the store is 'Star Wars' fans."

So

wants to gatekeep their stuff and, "My perspective on this is right and everyone else is wrong." And it's like the world is more than just your philosophy, my friend

Yeah, I did the retrospective of how many, like 17 "Christmas Carol" movies. Come on. That's blatantly all the same thing. We need, don't need just one. Different countries, different people, I like that, but cool. There's "Goodnight Mommy,"

Yep

the ori- the original, not the American remake

Correct. Which w- I haven't seen, so

Neither have I.

And Tale of Two Sisters has been on my list, so

It's a good movie. I'm sorry, I just kinda spoiled it for you.

that does

But not unlike this, you would've known it early on, and then you just appreciate it for its craft.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay, cool. Do we know what's next?

We do. We have Cargo coming up next from 2017, an Australian-US-United Arab Emirates-UK combination.

Ah, interesting. Okay.

Yeah

I don't even know about this one, so very good. Yeah. We'll look for it probably it's almost Christmas time as we record this for those of you listening to it in the future, we'll record it sometime after the holidays probably.

more than likely

All right, man. Have a good one.

I see you