Art house creepiness is not enough in 2015
A trend has emerged in European art house cinema to great acclaim and festival laurels and lucrative distribution deals abroad.
It’s toward a style you might call anti-horror: solemn, steely little films, often wilfully obscure, that tend to punctuate stretches of meaningfully ambiguous stillness with eruptions of vile and nauseating violence — carnage for the more discerning moviegoer, one supposes.
It’s the privilege of the anti-horror auteur to elude the charges of vulgarity that routinely cling to the directors of, say, low-budget Hollywood slashers, because long takes and subtitles are of course a guarantor of higher aspirations.
Meanwhile, we are only too happy to endure all this anti-horror cruelty — our noses rubbed in the sadism, leaving the theatre duly chastened.
This sort of thing might have qualified as transgressive at the turn of the century, when films such as Irreversible (2002) and The Piano Teacher (2001) really did take screen violence to new and provocative extremes. But every provocation has an upper limit. And it’s now 2015: It’s safe to say whatever appeal this routine once had has long since been exhausted.
I’m afraid that’s rather bad news for Goodnight Mommy, the latest goading anti-horror trifle. Provocation is all this thing is after — and in all the most predictable ways.
Here is a sampling of the clichés it invokes in earnest: Small children behaving ominously; stray cat callously murdered; defenceless woman bound and tortured at length; facial injuries graphically inflicted; an innocent person burned alive. These might constitute spoilers had they not seemed to be willed from the art house ether.
It is a hallmark of the anti-horror film to remain coy until the end about even the most essential narrative information, so naturally what Goodnight Mommy is about isn’t revealed until its final scene — though if you’ve seen an independent film any time since about 2004 you should be able to guess its major twist somewhere around the 10-minute mark.
In the interest of preserving some of the intended intrigue I’ll simply say the film concerns family and loss — two serious themes trivialized by crass theatrics.
What we’re really eager for, watching the action glacially unfold and the tension in the film slowly escalate, is for its pair of child stars to strike out nastily at mommy dearest, at least in the interest of getting on with what the movie obviously has in store. And we are soon rewarded with enough skin-burning and lip-slicing to send any respectable viewer into convulsions of wincing and cringing — though to what end I’m really not sure.
The movie’s bids toward extremism feel rather like posturing here, and all the more ineffectual for how late in the game these gestures arrive. Provocations of more consequence are beyond it. The only virtue this movie can claim is to be on trend.