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Review: Goodnight Mommy

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It’s a rare occurrence for a trailer to be as unsettling as Goodnight Mommy‘s without giving away the most disturbing bits. The film itself lives up to the trailer as it paints a twisted beautiful tale of a family’s struggle with loss. The film plays outs at a slow burn pace with each act shifting its tones until the unnerving third act.

The film follows a set of 9-year-old twin brothers Elias (Elias Schwarz) and Lukas (Lukas Schwarz) as they navigate their new home in the secluded German countryside. Their mother (Susanne Wuest) is a former anchorwoman who returns home to recover from major cosmetic surgery after a major accident. The two boys suspect something is wrong with their mother beyond the bandages as she acts withdrawn and hostile to them, Lukas in particular. Soon the boys start to believe the woman in the bandages is not their mother and begin to act upon their suspicions.

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Lukas Schwarz and Elias Schwarz give great presences in Goodnight Mommy.

The filmmakers do an excellent job of diversion, keeping the audience questioning the boys and their actions throughout the film. One of the main ways they do this is by switching the tone through each act to help build the tension. Goodnight Mommy preys upon its audience using beautiful cinematography (shot on 35mm) to pull them in, only to exploit their phobias creating a mood of distrust and paranoia. While never utilizing jump scares, the film using images of cockroaches, dead animals, and peaks at the mother’s cut up face to add to the intensity. This is, until the final act where fans of the genre are tested with brutal imagery that rivals some of Takashi Miike’s best horror work. The camera work is beautiful as the filmmakers use and create space to varying degrees for the actors to occupy creating an eery presence.

Goodnight Mommy is not only a great exercise in tension and diversion, but is a great character study of people who have survived a great tragedy. The characters in the film all seem to cope with the accident in their own way, often with anger and seclusion. As the boys’ suspicions rise, we start to see the motives behind each character’s actions come out organically. The film is a great piece of horror that should be experienced with little to no knowledge beforehand in a theater. The crowd reaction during the third act alone is worth the ticket. – 8/10

Goodnight Mommy is now playing in select theaters.

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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Trailer for ‘The Exorcism’ Has Russell Crowe Possessed

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The latest exorcism movie is about to drop this summer. It’s aptly titled The Exorcism and it stars Academy Award winner turned B-movie savant Russell Crowe. The trailer dropped today and by the looks of it, we are getting a possession movie that takes place on a movie set.

Just like this year’s recent demon-in-media-space film Late Night With the Devil, The Exorcism happens during a production. Although the former takes place on a live network talk show, the latter is on an active sound stage. Hopefully, it won’t be entirely serious and we’ll get some meta chuckles out of it.

The film will open in theaters on June 7, but since Shudder also acquired it, it probably won’t be long after that until it finds a home on the streaming service.

Crowe plays, “Anthony Miller, a troubled actor who begins to unravel while shooting a supernatural horror film. His estranged daughter, Lee (Ryan Simpkins), wonders if he’s slipping back into his past addictions or if there’s something more sinister at play. The film also stars Sam Worthington, Chloe Bailey, Adam Goldberg and David Hyde Pierce.”

Crowe did see some success in last year’s The Pope’s Exorcist mostly because his character was so over-the-top and infused with such comical hubris it bordered on parody. We will see if that is the route actor-turned-director Joshua John Miller takes with The Exorcism.

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