Goodnight Mommy is a psychological thriller film and a remake of the 2014 Austrian film of the same name starring Naomi Watts and the twin brothers, Nicholas and Cameron Corvetti.
Goodnight Mommy follows two brothers, Elias and Lucas, who meet their mother after a long time and find her wrapped in bandages. Soon, they suspect that their mother has been replaced by an imposter as they start observing drastic changes in her behavior.
Brimming with suspense from the initial moments of the film, Prime Video’s remake of the 2014 Austrian thriller poses many questions throughout the runtime. From the mother’s real identity to the suspicious barn, quite a lot of things don’t make sense at the first glance. Directed by Matt Sobel, Goodnight Mommy presents a psychological thriller with spooky horror undertones.
Goodnight Mommy Story Summary
The twins Elias (Cameron Crovetti) and Lucas (Nicholas Crovetti) are dropped at their mother’s (Naomi Watts) house by their father.
After some probing, the twins find their mom with her head wrapped up in bandages with only her lips and eyes visible. Meeting her kids after a long time, she tells them that she has had a procedure done. Later, she guides the kids through the house rules, which include no running in the house, keeping the blinds on as the sun is not good for her skin, and staying off-limits from her office, bedroom, and the barn.
After spending some time with her kids, the mother put the kids to bed. Before sleeping, Elias shares with Lucas that he feels something has changed with his mother when she refuses to sing the bedtime song that she always sings for the two before bed.
The next day, while playing in the fields, Elias decides to sneak into the barn against his mother’s orders.
Although the two don’t find anything substantial in the barn, Elias finds one of the walls to be red and suspects it to be blood. When Elias and Lucas exit the barn, they are caught by their mother, who reprimands them and orders them to stay inside from thereon. The same night, Elias finds his mother talking to somebody on the phone about having Elias gone as he knows something is wrong.
In the morning, Elias shares his findings with Lucas, and they plant a walkie-talkie in their mother’s room to keep track of her conversations. Their mission is interrupted as their mother enters the room in the middle. Elias finds a drawing given by the brothers in the dustbin, and Lucas witnesses his mother tearing the drawing in front of him.
Lucas worries that the woman who’s pretending to be his mother may be an imposter and shares his concerns with Elias. They also compare the woman’s eyes with a photograph of their mother in which she can be seen having green eyes, unlike the blue eyes of the woman.
When the siblings try contacting their father, their mother breaks Elias’ phone. Upon hearing moaning from his mother’s room in the night, Elias decides to sneak into her room and finds her in the bathtub wearing a face mask. He tries to take off her mask, but she wakes up.
Elias is confronted by his mother, and an argument follows between the two before Elias is slapped and punished by his mother.
Doubtful about the safety, Lucas asks Elias to leave the house together. On the other hand, Elias dreams about his mother peeling her skin off and revealing a black-skinned body inside.
Lucas and Elias find a house nearby where they decide to sleep until the storm passes. They wake up when they are found by two police officers. The kids share their suspicion about their mother being an imposter with the cops.
The cops lie to the kids about taking them to a safe place and instead, return them to their mother, who doesn’t have the bandages anymore and looks perfectly fine. Elias’ mother, who is popular in the neighborhood, wards off the cops by saying that the kids were just fantasizing.
Goodnight Mommy Ending Explained
Later, when Elias pretends to sleep, his mother comes up to him and tells him how his actions forced her to take her bandages off three days before schedule. In the morning, when she wakes up, she finds herself tied to her bed. Elias and Lucas question the woman about their mom as Elias remains determined to find his real mom’s whereabouts.
The woman continues to claim that she is their real mother and her real eyes are blue as she was wearing contacts for her headshots. While Lucas attempts to convince Elias to leave together before it’s late, Elias starts sympathizing with the woman as he starts believing that she is his real mother.
Elias decides to look for her purse to find the contact lenses and verify whether she’s lying about her eyes. Lucas finds the purse first and makes Elias believe that there are no contact lenses in the purse and the imposter is lying.
Does Elias find his real mother?
As Elias and Lucas prepare to leave, the two cops from the earlier night pay a visit to check on them again. Elias successfully makes the two believe that their mom has gone to the town. Just before the Uber comes to pick up Elias and Lucas, Elias decides to check himself whether the contacts are in the purse and finds out that Lucas has lied.
Lucas tries to convince Elias, but Elias shuts Lucas off and goes ahead and releases his mother. Elias owes to his mistake and asks his mother to talk to Lucas, who told Elias in the first place that she may be an imposter.
With Lucas nowhere in sight, Elias is taken to the barn by his mother, and she shows him the same blood-stained wall that Elias had seen earlier. It is revealed that it was Elias who had accidentally shot Lucas, and Elias has been hallucinating about seeing Lucas all this time.
Refusing to accept the truth, Elias pushes Susanne and she falls from a height. The lantern in her hand sets the barn on fire. Elias looks at his unconscious mother and leaves her behind in the barn as the barn is consumed by the fire.
As he falls to the ground and sobs, Elias senses a pat from his mother, who’s standing behind Elias with Lucas beside her.
Elias, who was seeing hallucinations of his brother so far, has now started seeing his mother too as he cannot accept the truth that he has been responsible for his mother and brother’s death. Elias continues to evade the truth and accepts his hallucinations as his reality.
Goodnight Mommy is now streaming on Prime Video.
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