Although they have always been there, the exponential increase in production and popularity of remakes has led to rivers of ink being written about a type of feature film that is usually treated too harshly, alleging lack of creativity and other more or less unfounded arguments, but which have been translated into some of the most brilliant titles in the history of cinema.
In my humble opinion, the practice of remake should not have negative connotations of being treated with a will to renew; giving turns of the nut and providing freshness as well exemplified by gems like ‘Scarface’ or ‘La cosa’. Even when playing photocopy consciously as part of a metalinguistic discourse, as in Gus Van Sant’s ‘Psychosis’ or Michael Haneke’s ‘Funny Games’, the new versions can have value and reason for being.
However, there is always the long shadow of those traces devoid of soul that, despite incorporating variations, end up subtracting more than contributing to the cause. And this is precisely the case of ‘Good night, mom’; a sort of Disney interpretation of the blunt original that dilutes between melodramas and half measures the intense tour de force that we were able to enjoy in 2014.
Until tomorrow if God wants to
I perfectly remember how Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz managed to polarize with their ‘Goodnight Mommy’ opinions eight years ago during the Sitges Festival. Where many were dissatisfied, many others fell exhausted before a sample of that sober, austere and unsettling terror which, inheriting form and tone from the Haneke school, suffocated with its impossible combination of torture porn and author horror.
In contrast to the Austrian film, the version released on Amazon Prime Video surprises negatively in the first contact with a much less elegant and refined visual treatment. Gone are this planning calculated to the millimeter, that slow and oppressive montage and that careful photography enriched by the texture and color of 35mm and presented in 2.39:1.
Instead, ‘Goodnight, Mom’ does little justice to visible efforts of his team with an excessively “television” presentation —note the inverted commas, since this term has less and less meaning in this context—; something that affects both routine staging as well as a formal finish with much less character and that is not afraid to reveal its digital nature in some passages.
In terms of tone and storytelling, the work of filmmaker Matt Sobel and his screenwriter Kyle Warren is also much more obvious and scruffy; betting on music to feed its not so effective atmosphere, making tremendously obvious the dramatic twist on which the story pivots in the opening bars of the second act and unnecessarily underscoring it with a post-reveal montage sequence, which seriously mars the experience.
Along the way there has also been the immense bad milk distilled by the source of reference, sweetening to unsuspected limits a second half that opens the way to the melodrama and in which there is no longer room for violence and sadismbut for a tremendously decaffeinated terror and incapable of making a single hair stand on end from an audience that, by now, is already cured of fright.
On the other side of the coin, the interpretations of the brothers Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti and of one naomi watts that continues to show its good talents for the genre, keep afloat a rehash without incentives for the connoisseurs of its predecessor, but that will satisfy to a certain extent those who arrive virgins and prefer to ignore the grotesque benefits of the original —to make matters worse, also available on Prime Video—.