GOODNIGHT MOMMY

Director's Statement

A horror film? An arthouse film? Our film is meant to be both. We love physical cinema. We love films which are physically overwhelming. Films which are not simply about a concept or telling a story but rather one that show people sweating, trembling and screaming, and in which this sweating, trembling and screaming is passed on for the audience to experience. At the same time we also want to use this story to ask what we believe are existential questions. Questions directly related to lived reality. Questions about education, power relationships within families and about identity. Is it possible to maintain a consistent personality in life? Or to have different identities depending on social context? Identities which, perhaps, encourage monstrous things to emerge? In our film there are bandages, masks and surfaces, and questions about what they may be concealing. For this reason it was very important that in this – our first feature film – we shot on 35mm film, regardless of budget constraints. For us a face on 35mm simply has more mystery about it. Yet despite these mysteries, childhood games and psychological puzzles we still feel bound to a certain naturalism, to a rootedness in reality. We also wanted to make a film that says something about our lives. “Goodnight Mommy” (Ich seh Ich seh) is a mother-child-horror-fairy-tale, a little story about a great loss of trust, a psycho-terror-chamber piece born of the everyday and rooted in the simplest of things: a bandaged face, a mistaken sentence, the death of a cat, a magnifying glass and dental floss.