Severin Fiala
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Filmography
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Eyes Without a Face (1960)
Directed by Georges Franju
influenced Goodnight Mommy (2015)
Themes Plot Visuals
A German-language Austrian production that qualifies as both art film and horror movie (like one of its inspirations, the 1960 French masterpiece "Eyes Without a Face"), the film takes place in and around a remote, modernistic home of wall-sized windows and clear acrylic egg-shaped chairs.
A little “Eyes Without A Face,” a little “Dead Ringers,” with some of the bracing provocation of “Dogtooth,” “Goodnight Mommy” is also reminiscent of the wicked games of their countryman Michael Haneke.
It begins with a remarkable straightforward plot mirroring that classic French nightmare “Eyes Without a Face.”
In her bandages, Wuest evokes memories of such films as "Eyes Without a Face" or the Pedro Almodovar riff on that film, "The Skin I Live In."
She looks like the disfigured daughter in Georges Franju’s “Eyes Without a Face” (1960), and her 9-year-old twin boys, Lukas (Lukas Schwartz) and Elias (Elias Schwartz), have the uncanny menace of the famous Diane Arbus photo of twins , alluded to with chilling effect in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980).
Just look at the ingredients: creepy twins like the girls from The Shining, bandages that scream Eyes Without a Face, not to mention cockroaches, crucifixes, a whispering forest, a graveyard and an entire bunker full of skulls and bones over which the boys clamber in their matching Crocs.
They somewhat boldly invite comparisons by invoking John Carpenter's The Thing , and what it ultimately borrows from that snowbound horror classic (more its quiet final tone than anything like gore and jump scares) might indicate how much The Lodge will or won't appeal to the tastes of the viewer.
Some healthy chunks of scenery from John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) adds to the sense of menace, paralleling the dread of chaos unfolding in an uninhabitable wintry climate (though the real purpose of these clips seems to be for a line goading the direction of the film suggesting the dangers of cabin fever).
Sergio Casci's script, written with the filmmakers, teases out uncertainties as to whether the children, Grace herself or some dreadful unseen force is responsible for the unnerving developments, throwing in playful hints of lurking evil at one point by having them watch another cabin-fever chiller, John Carpenter's The Thing , on TV, switching channels to Jack Frost just to keep us guessing.
(An argument can even be made for 1982’s The Thing, had the filmmakers not already spoon-fed the allusion for us).
Using a harsh and unforgiving landscape as the backdrop to an isolated dwelling to great effect (think: The Shining or The Thing ), directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have made an effective follow-up to their 2014 cult hit, Goodnight Mommy .
Here the pair does not shy away from the body of “white death” horror that came before The Lodge , with eerie and sometimes humorous nods to The Thing and The Shining , among others, haunting the piece.
The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced The Lodge (2020), Goodnight Mommy (2015)
Themes Visuals
Anyone who has seen Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (read: everyone) knows there is nothing more terrifying than snow when combined with isolation.
The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
On an aesthetic level, The Lodge has visual poetry reminiscent of the visual poetry in The Shining.
Using a harsh and unforgiving landscape as the backdrop to an isolated dwelling to great effect (think: The Shining or The Thing ), directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala have made an effective follow-up to their 2014 cult hit, Goodnight Mommy .
Here the pair does not shy away from the body of “white death” horror that came before The Lodge , with eerie and sometimes humorous nods to The Thing and The Shining , among others, haunting the piece.
Taking cues from classic films ranging from Rebecca, to The Thing and a little The Shining sprinkled around, The Lodge is posed to be 2019’s first horror sensation.
Dead Ringers (1988)
Directed by David Cronenberg
influenced Goodnight Mommy (2015)
Themes Characters
A little “Eyes Without A Face,” a little “Dead Ringers,” with some of the bracing provocation of “Dogtooth,” “Goodnight Mommy” is also reminiscent of the wicked games of their countryman Michael Haneke.
Promotional materials claim that "Goodnight Mommy" is on par with "The Shining" and "Dead Ringers."
Take a hike, Jeremy Irons’ scary gynaecologist brothers in Dead Ringers.
From Margot Kidder and her formerly conjoined sibling in Brian De Palma's early Sisters through a demented Jeremy Irons times two in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, there's a rich history of horror exploiting the potential for intuitive communication, conspiracy, loyalty, betrayal and creepiness in twins.
The Schwarzes give such symbiotic performances that it’s easy to imagine the characters being played by the same actor, like the aloof dual roles of Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers or Armie Hammer in The Social Network.
The Witch (2016)
Directed by Robert Eggers
influenced The Devil's Bath (2024), The Lodge (2020)
Themes Visuals
While inevitable comparisons will be made with Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), it’s more spiritually akin to Peter Brunner’s Luzifer (2021). But Agnes is a protagonist who behaves inversely to the victims we often see in films like this because she’s pious–an innocent. Whereas the rebellious young women in The Crucible engage in behavior which instigated a witch hunt, Agnes turns inward, seeking self annihilation.
Early on, Franz and Fiala’s new film recalls Robert Eggers’ The Witch, despite being set more than a century later, in 1750. It has a comparable emphasis on ambience and authentic historical detail, which is possibly even more granular here. But vague suggestions of witchcraft quickly turn out to be misleading, with the story instead fueled by converging forces of religion, folklore and nature.
The Devil’s Bath operates according to the tenets of folkloric horror, but doesn’t feature anything remotely fantastical outside Agnes’ fever dreams. Whereas Robert Eggers’ The Witch molds olden tales of oppressively religious teachings into outright horror imagery, The Devil’s Bath remains grounded and earthly.
The dense, swampy landscape and gloomy aesthetic of The Devil’s Bath serve well to enhance the film’s narrative tension, comparable to the cinematography of Robert Eggers’ The Witch. Nature at the beginning of the film seems friendly, as we see Agnes joyfully weaving flowers into her wedding headpiece and playing with an insect. The forest appears more sinister, however, as Agnes becomes emotionally detached.
From the film’s harrowing opening scene, immediately invoking the austere natural beauty and historical accuracy of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, we see the dire consequences of this troubling view on salvation.
Still, it’s too much of a low-key mixed bag to repeat the significant popular success of tonally similar recent Sundance midnighters like “The Witch” and “Hereditary” when Neon launches a U.S. theatrical release later this year.
Funny Games (2008)
Directed by Michael Haneke
influenced Goodnight Mommy (2015)
Themes Visuals Characters
It’s not recommended for nervous types — the psychological and visceral brutality here may put you in mind of another Austrian director, the unblinking Michael Haneke , particularly his “Funny Games.”
Suffice it to say, the pic’s reality is not our own — more akin to fellow Austrian Michael Haneke’s “Funny Games,” where psychology offers limited insights into human behavior and the body-horror moments feel nerve-twistingly raw.
Written and directed by first-timers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala with a stylistic nod to the sick Funny Games by fellow Austrian Michael Haneke, the movie is a mad, malevolent adventure through the minds of its three characters and the house they inhabit.
But the boys themselves display a certain coolness that suggests they’re far from innocent: Franz and Fiala shoot them like a cross between the two girls from The Shining and the two young psychos from fellow Austrian provocateur Michael Haneke’s Funny Games.
Not since Michael Haneke unleashed a pair of psychotic young sadists on an unsuspecting family in his original 1997 Funny Games has a summer getaway in the peaceful Austrian countryside seemed less like a vacation.
Una de las fuentes de inspiración que tuvieron los directores Severin Fiala y Verónica Franz -quienes además dirigen aquí su primer largometraje- es sin dudas Funny Games, aquella fantástica cinta hecha por su compatriota Michael Haneke.
Hereditary (2018)
Directed by Ari Aster
influenced The Lodge (2020), Goodnight Mommy (2015)
Themes Visuals
Sure, there were the duds along the way, but for every Slender Man we got a Babadook, and every for every Vampires Suck we got a Hereditary.
At its best, the minimalist setting creates the haunting impression of “The Others” in the woods, with hints of the precise formalism that made last year’s “Hereditary” such a haunting immersion.
The eerie rhythms of the universe that gave us Deep Impact and Armageddon, Antz and A Bug’s Life, and Fyre and Fyre Fraud have conspired to make The Lodge exist in Hereditary ’s shadow, but while some tonal and iconographic similarities exist, the two films jump off their shared diving board into very different corners of the psycho-mom pool.
While the set design features an overdependence on parallels with a doll house (a la Hereditary , 2018), the early establishing characteristics work best with Silverstone’s character, a Christian woman whose skewed faith is much more perverted than the various icons and crosses decorating her exterior living spaces would suggest.
Of all of the three traumatized IT children orphan movies, it’s the most effective, recalling Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, and especially, Ari Aster’s Hereditary, due to its liberal use of miniature figures and dollhouses in the imagery.
Reminiscent of Midsommar with a critical doll house that is eerily similar to the one in Hereditary, The Lodge is a psychological horror film filled with shocking scenes that keeps the audience on the edge of their seat with their head buried in their shirt.
Within the context of 1956's German family feature "The Trapp Family" (a key inspiration for 1959 Broadway musical "The Sound of Music" and its 1965 film adaptation starring Julie Andrews), the sight of Ruth Leuwerik singing Johannes Brahms's "Wiegenlied: Guten Abend, gute Nacht" surrounded by her character's adorable brood of stepchildren makes for a heartwarming cinematic adieu.
Opening with a cheeky nod to the saccharine midcentury harmonies of The Sound of Music’s Von Trapp clan, horror import Goodnight Mommy is racking up raves for its slightly more menacing take on familial love and devotion in the idyllic Austrian countryside: What if the mother you loved wasn’t really your mother, but something utterly sinister posing in her skin?
Franz and Fiala achieve this through an immersive sound design, droning music and the heavy blues, grays and browns evoked by the claustrophobic camerawork of DP Thimios Bakatakis, who shot Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Accomplished cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis, who shot Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer , shapes another forbidding canvas of gloom and shadow, pierced by interludes of startling luminosity.
There’s a clinical effect to their visuals that recalls Yorgos Lanthimos ( The Lobster , The Favourite ), as characters are framed against sparse backgrounds, and the camera lingers on awful sights.
The script does a decent job at connecting the dots, but at the end of the day, the biggest help here is Thimios Bakatakis’s (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) cinematography.
From the arrival scene at the lodge which cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis ("The Lobster") has composed to mimic the Overlook Hotel in miniature to the roving through the rooms of a creepy dollhouse which seems to foretell the future, one continually notes references to better horror films.
Religious iconography, theistic guilt, and spiritual loneliness are all major themes, and the final product has shadows of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman In the Dunes.
At its best, the minimalist setting creates the haunting impression of “The Others” in the woods, with hints of the precise formalism that made last year’s “Hereditary” such a haunting immersion.
The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
Directors Franz and Fiala (along with their scriptwriting partner Sergio Casci) drop in a tribute to John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and appear to be fans of the aforementioned “The Shining” and “The Others,” among other horror classics, judging by certain plot elements and visual references.
At one point the characters themselves seem to stop just short of invoking the plot of “The Others,” a horror picture they may have seen once upon a happier time.
Even by genre film standards, what goes on here requires so many lapses of logic, starting with the half-assed explanation required to get Richard out of the house (not to mention the icky fact that he first met Grace while researching the story of her father’s cult for a book), that the screenplay by Fiala, Franz and Sergio Casci feels more like a lazy and increasingly half-assed attempt to rehash elements of “The Shining,” “The Others” and “Hereditary” than anything else and while they do manage to generate a convincingly frigid atmosphere, they don’t do much of anything with it.
“The Lodge,” which climbs from low-level melancholy to all-out hysteria, tips its hat to several predecessors, “Hereditary,” “The Shining” and “The Others” among them.
John and the Hole (2021)
Directed by Pascual Sisto
influenced by Goodnight Mommy (2015)
Visuals Plot
That recognition is bolstered by cinematographer Paul Ozgur’s stark, naturalistic camera, which recalls both Haneke’s unsettling dramas as well as Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s Goodnight Mommy , a more intense horror movie about homicidal children in a secluded, wealthy setting.
But it more specifically recalls the 2014 nail-biter by the Austrian auteur’s compatriots Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, Goodnight Mommy — in the unsettling scenario of a child wresting control from adults in a sleek modern house nestled among tranquil woodlands and in its fixed shots loaded with menace.
The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
The Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
Even with its echoes of "The Bad Seed" and "Misery," "Goodnight Mommy" unexpectedly hits a squirm-inducing nerve.
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1976)
Directed by Lewis John Carlino
influenced Goodnight Mommy (2015)
Themes
I say it's closer to "Lord of the Flies" and a disturbing 1976 Kris Kristofferson drama "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea."
Although you might figure out the big final twist in “Goodnight Mommy” early on—which isn’t all that difficult to do, even if you haven’t seen Robert Mulligan’s 1972 adaptation of Thomas Tryon’s “The Other” to serve as a prompt—it will probably still fascinate you, as well as creep you out.
From Margot Kidder and her formerly conjoined sibling in Brian De Palma's early Sisters through a demented Jeremy Irons times two in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, there's a rich history of horror exploiting the potential for intuitive communication, conspiracy, loyalty, betrayal and creepiness in twins.
Her naked stroll through the woods culminating with a "Jacob's Ladder" type of head-shaking seems promising, but is nothing more than a dead end.
But the most genuinely nightmarish moment is a vision in a forest, involving some of that high-speed head-shaking that you inevitably associate with Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, and that hasn’t lost its freaky power here.
She does act pretty strange, wandering off into the woods and removing her clothes and peeling off the bandages and going all Jacob’s Ladder on our asses with that freaky blurred-out head-shaking.