Metacritic reviews

Goodnight Mommy, a brilliantly sinister horror film in the recent art-house mold of "The Babadook" and "It Follows," has a premise that cracks like the whip of a devil’s tail.

The story's acceleration from anxiety to panic to hellish chaos is expertly managed, but more impressively, so is the control of internal narrative logic.

This elegantly nasty little potboiler should satisfy those brave enough to brave it. They might see the big reveal coming, but that won’t help them unsee the horrors leading up to it.

Shooting in sleek 35mm, Franz and Fiala have dreamt up a home-invasion scenario where the aggressors lived there all along.

Unspooling with virtually no music and a seriously unsettling sound design, Goodnight Mommy gains significant traction from small moments.

An unnerving descent into the extreme, anxious corners of a mother’s relationship to and comprehension of her 9-year-old twin sons – and vice versa – gone weirdly haywire, Goodnight Mommy is required viewing for both lovers of neo-gothic paranoia and mommy-haters everywhere.

It's a resonant, atmospheric horror film that treats its genre and its audience with unusual respect, before escalating in its last moments to a brilliantly uncompromised finale.

Goodnight Mommy is a well-crafted cheat with a killer punch.

In the third act, the film devolves into an extremely unsettling series of sadistic tortures, the kind of stuff that would appeal largely to fans of Funny Games.

Perhaps a more unassuming genre director would have tightened this movie’s cables a little, so that it had more tension and less revulsion. At all events, it delivers some nasty shocks.