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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 The two boys suspect something is wrong with their mother beyond the bandages as she acts withdrawn and hostile to them, Lukas in particular.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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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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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 presumed innocent

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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