It can’t be entirely coincidental that last year’s breakout horror film, The Babadook, was centered around the frustrating and intimate relationship of a mother and her child and this year’s best horror film—it’s true, I’m putting it in writing—is very similarly themed. In Goodnight Mommy, from Austrian directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz who also wrote the script, instead of a mother wary of her high-strung child, two twin brothers become suspicious of their mother when she returns from plastic surgery with her face in bandages. What The Babadook did so brilliantly was to fluctuate between two horror-mother norms: the mother as savior (think Poltergeist’s Diane Freeling) and the mother as an evil threat (think Carrie’s Margaret White). Goodnight Mommy similarly plays with these horror expectations of mothers but keeps its audience guessing by placing the vantage point in the immature, and therefore unreliable, eyes of two nine-year-old twin boys.

With no sense of what the children’s mother (Susanne Wuest) was like before she arrives back home in full facial bandages, the film is immediately set up for our trust to lie wholly with Elias and Lukas (Elias Schwarz and Lukas Schwarz), a pair of boys who love to roam the woods and fields around their country home, collecting bugs and caring for animals. When their mother returns after surgery—and through an awkward guessing game she plays with the boys it’s revealed she’s a famous TV personality, so it’s likely cosmetic—the boys take the brunt of her sudden mood swings and apparent preferential treatment of one twin over the other. She is volatile and unreasonably strict. When her behavior gets stranger and her temper more intense, the boys—their insatiable curiosity evident—test their mother and track her behavior in an attempt to prove their theory.

The film picks up—and indeed shifts darkly—in its second half when the boys plan, first, to escape the intruder they believe is posing as their mother, and then when that fails, to take action into their own hands to get answers. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, things get squirmy. Even more squirmy because of the constant question of whether or not the violence is or is not deserved. There’s an excellent eleventh-hour reveal that this viewer certainly did not predict and certainly won’t elaborate on. Suffice it to say the film excellently holds focus to divert from the reality of the situation.

The Schwarz brothers carry the film incredibly well for their age and the relatively small amount of dialogue involved. Their constant discomfort at trying first to please their mother and understand her actions, and then at the dawning terror of believing she isn’t who they think, is perfectly conveyed in their nine-year-old fidgeting and wide eyes. They constantly convey that childlike hesitancy in questioning elders or believing a family member could ever be capable of anything but loving behavior. And when things get serious it’s that innocent quality that amplifies the horror of their behavior. It’s so easy for children to be evil in horror films, something we’ve come to expect even, and Fiala and Franz don’t let the boys fall squarely into that space. Their intentions—to get their mother back—are so pure it’s hard not to justify the actions of a pair of scared (and perhaps too imaginative) little boys.

The boys’ imaginations are used throughout the film, often practically as they invent new ways of testing and keeping an eye on their maybe-faux-mother, but also literally in scenes that are revealed to actually be dreams. Normally the use of false-reality sequences in horror films feel like cheap scares, showing supernatural elements in order to trick us into thinking we understand what’s happening, only to be yanked back into the present and be just as confused as ever. But Fiala and Franz use these moments sparingly and add plausibility by making it so easy to believe children have vivid and scary dreams. The effective and limited use of music also gives a sense of realism that enhances the tension and blurs the line between what is real and what isn’t. Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, shooting on 35-milimeter, frames the stoic modern house with its wide windows against the many outdoor scenes of the boys playing in yellow fields, jumping on drying mud, and winding through corn fields and tree-filled forests. The distinction clearly implying the serene safety of the outside versus the cold grey uncertainty of their mother’s home.

At all moments a deftly crafted mystery and with thoughtful scares and the sort of shocks that don’t feel extraneous, Goodnight Mommy is a must-see for anyone who appreciates sustained suspense, and who maybe doesn’t mind a trip to a masseuse after to get all that tension worked out. A repeat viewing feels necessary to watch the film with fresh eyes after the truth is revealed, and if mandatory repeat watching isn’t the mark of a good film, I don’t know what is.

Goodnight Mommy is currently playing in NY, LA, and Austin and will open in additional cities September 25, 2015. 

Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz (wife of auteur Ulrich Seidl) and Severin Fiala first present Goodnight Mommy as a mystery with a horror film premise–two nine-year-old twin brothers question their mother’s identity after a facial surgery leaves most of her face covered with bandages. The boys notice their mother acting out of the ordinary, she never shows them any affection and seems to favor one brother over the other. Though to be fair, the mother was never shown before the surgery, so it’s hard to say how much she has changed. The first two acts of the film keeps things ambitious, never knowing if the mom is really someone else or if the kids are right. Goodnight Mommy escalates into the torture film variety in the last act, making the film difficult to stomach when it switches from psychological suspense to physical horror.

Goodnight Mommy is a promising start for this Austrian duo, who take us to haunting places using shock value and atmospheric visuals. Though the film works best when its carefully manipulating the audience’s emotions and suspicions. A twist near the end will either come as a welcoming surprise or a cheap trick, but either way it’s not quite enough to compensate for the excessive and disturbing violence.

Ulrich Seidl packs a punch full of irony in Paradise: Love where neither paradise nor love is anywhere to be found. On display instead is a voyeuristic view of a shy woman in search of love who goes wild and ends up on both sides of exploitation. There is some repetition in the film as naked men and women prance around as slaves to one another, but the images never leave you and the message registers loud and clear. Even though the film is the first installment of a trilogy, a fact that I was unaware of when I first saw it at the Chicago International Film Festival, Paradise: Love can easily stand on its own.

Paradise: Love starts off with a bang, literally, as a group of autistic people slam into one another with bumper cars. The sequence is a powerful one and serves as a bit of irony when the main character preaches to the drivers to not get too wild, then later in film goes wild herself. A large amount of screaming is heard from people in the bumper cars but it appears to be out of pure pleasure, the result is an excellent display of our instinctive human desire to achieve fulfillment. And that ends up being one of the major themes of the film.

At the heart of the film is an overweight Austrian woman named Teresa who travels to the paradise beaches of Kenya to get a break from her daily grind. When she arrives at her beachside hotel, Teresa’s neat-freak personality is shown when she uses spray to disinfect everything in her room. Teresa and the rest of the vacationers stick out like sore thumbs as the close-knit group of women are all overweight and light skinned in a sea of thin dark skinned males. But unlike the other Austrian women of the group who flaunt their money around and treat the locals as their own personal sex slaves, Teresa is shy around them and is more concerned with relaxing on the beach by herself.

However, her innocence does not last long, which leads into to the other theme of the film, exploitation. Teresa is annoyed when all of the men harass her as she tries to walk the beaches, trying to sell her jewelry and claiming to give her the best deals. One man tries to seduce her but she denies him by saying that he does not love her – finally exposing what she is ultimately perusing, love. Slowly she begins to accept and even embrace the attention they give her by using her money to love. But the question that lingers is what happens when she has no money left to give?

A transformation is easily seen as the same woman who was disinfecting her room at the beginning is seen rolling around naked in it by the end of the film. The same woman who refused to have sex with a man because she did not feel loved forgoes her restraints after she realizes how much power she has. She uses the locals to fulfill her desires and they use her for her money, the common ground is that everyone is treated like an object.

The picturesque scenery of sandy beaches and clear waters gives the illusion of paradise but serves as a great juxtaposition to the monstrosity that unfolds. And there is a lot of that going on in this film. As with most of Seidl’s films, Paradise: Love is a provocative film that does not hold back from showing harsh realities that are as hard to look away from as they are to look at. The film itself is incredibly simple and easy to follow, but what it captures are complex themes found in human nature. In Paradise: Love, Seidl explores areas that others either refuse or are simply too afraid to explore.

Ulrich Seidl has a knack for making his audience uncomfortable and Import/Export is certainly no different. If any amusement is found in the film, it generally comes at someone else’s expense. The theme of Import/Export is an unwavering look at human exploitation in the form of amusement from humiliation. Even though much of what is on display in the film is human misery, by reminding the audience that death is only a matter of time, it reinforces the notion of making the most out of life no matter how unpleasant it may currently be.

Olga Guseva (Ekateryna Rak) is seen walking to work every morning through the snowy landscapes of Ukraine to her nursing job that pays her very little. After the final straw of not receiving her full paycheck that she is promised, the single mother is forced to seek new job opportunities in order to provide for herself and her baby. Apparently the options were pretty slim because she settles for an internet live-sex operator who performs sexual deeds via a webcam. Just as one would suspect, the work is very degrading and therefore does not last very long. In an effort to occupy a profession that is more gratifying, Olga retreats to Austria as a cleaning woman, leaving behind her young child with her mother to care for.

Import/Export receives its title because it follows two parallel storylines of characters in similar situations that move from one location to another. So as we follow Olga from lousy job to lousy job we also witness Paul (Paul Hofmann) as he is humiliated at his low-level mall security guard job by local Austrian thugs. Near the time Olga “imports” to Austria from the Ukraine in order to pursue a better life, Paul “exports” old arcade cabinets with his father from Austria to the Ukraine. Along the way, Paul and his father endure situations that no father and son should ever experience together.

The explicit connection these two characters share is the endless state of despair due to their unfulfilling jobs. Both Olga and Paul are dirt poor and merely go through the motions of living their mundane lives rather than exercise much enthusiasm for anything. Seidl paints a picture that is always as gloomy as it is outside; often showing devastating shots of poverty-stricken people who live in filth, which perfectly reflects the ugliness of the characters on screen. He finds a way for the audience to have vested interest in characters that have little to offer and who are deprived of everything, including their dignity.

As long as one is not new to Seidl as a director, there should be no surprises that Import/Export is mostly a grim, brutal exploitation film. Rather than hint at or slowly reveal what the film is about, Seidl bluntly displays what he is trying to bring about with images that stick with you. Obvious parallels are made throughout as characters see both sides of exploitation. An example of this is when Paul uses his dog to exploit someone’s fear of dogs for his amusement but then he is later forced to watch a prostitute who must involuntarily act like a dog on a leash at the expense of someone else’s amusement. As sad as it may be, sometimes it takes witnessing the relentless despair of others to be thankful of our own lives, and that is what the film is truly about.

A highly anticipated screening I attended here at Berlinale was Ulrich Seidl’s third installment of his Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Hope. I have only seen one other film in the Paradise trilogy, which was Paradise: Love, but this did not impact my reception or understanding of the film, as Paradise: Hope is perfectly capable of standing alone because it runs parallel to the other two films.

I have always appreciated the efforts of taking traditional story-lines and presenting them in exceptionally non-traditional ways. Paradise: Hope tells the usual story of desire for a love unattainable and the potential security that might come with it. This desire, however, is found between a thirteen year-old girl, Melanie–at a diet camp in Austria–and the camp’s fifty-something year old doctor. It is a coming of age film, and a journey of self-discovery for both sides of situation. In between the camp’s strict regimen of exercise and nutrition classes, hilariously presented, the youth of the camp spend their time being curious and frustrated pubescent teens. The film keeps a steady pace, splitting its time between the love story of the doctor and Melanie, the antics of being in the camp.

Paradise: Hope is very minimalistic. This is accented in the fact that the entire camp, consisting of twenty-four kids, is held on a massive campus. Seidl succeeds in keeping the story on track, regardless of the extreme nature of the setting, by ignoring societal norms that would otherwise carry issue. The doctor is never demonized, and the question of age is never addressed; to the point that when Melanie asks the doctor why they cannot be together, age is not brought up.

Aesthetically, the film takes advantage of long takes, as well as owning the silence that often falls between the doctor and Melanie. Both actors are brilliant at expressing themselves without words, and when they do speak the words are simple and short, further adding to Seidl’s minimalism. Repetition and patterns in action mimic the diet camps call for discipline, which serves as an overall metaphor for shaping youth to fit into an adult world.

The film also has an exceptionally organic feel to the image with natural light elements, diffusion, and stark film grain. This organic feel adds to the idea of adolescent growth and development. I found Paradise: Hope to carry a powerful voice in telling a rich and involving story about life, love and growth. However, I will add its minimalism, symbolism, and foreign nature might not please everybody, but I would definitely say it is worth a look.

If there is one thing Ulrich Seidl is the master of, it is getting a reaction out of his audience. Whether or not it is a positive one is another story. This is especially in film Dog Days as there are an inordinate amount of reviews detailing people walking out on the film in the theaters. It is not very hard to see why; the film shows its cruel nature from the very beginning, and does not loosen its grip by the time the credits start to roll. It cannot be overstated enough that the film is not for everyone.

As suggested by its title, Dog Days is set during the hottest days of the summer in a suburb of Vienna. In this suburban development, the unoriginal mass-produced houses share the same misery as the owners that occupy them. Through the lives of several different characters, the film exhibits the loneliness of these middle-class Austrian citizens, often in a deranged sexual manner.

Characters range from a stripper who gets abused by her over-protective boyfriend that hits her as much as any guy who looks at her, to an autistic hitchhiker who constantly recites useless Top 10 facts while making perverse sexual conversation with the passengers. Other characters include; a skeptical alarm salesman, an elderly man who longings for his housekeeper, a middle-aged teacher who seemingly welcomes sexual depraved men to have their way with her, and a divorced couple that somehow thinks living together is a good idea.

These are not all the characters contained in the film, but the point is that none of them are at all flattering. Dog Days never asks for a single ounce of sympathy from any of the characters, mostly because none of them have any redeeming qualities. There is nothing wrong with filling up the screen with a bunch of flawed characters, but the real issue here is in the lack of direction. Unlike Seidl’s more recent work in Paradise: Love, Dog Days is much less refined. Therefore, the clarity of the film’s intent becomes much less apparent.

Early in Ulrich Seidl’s career, he made a name for himself from the documentaries he made. Here in his first narrative feature, he utilizes some of the same characteristics that a documentary has in order to achieve the same feel of authenticity. A good example of this is how the film mostly observes its characters, rather than the perception of them being controlled by a script.

Just like hottest days of summer can be uncomfortable to bear, Dog Days is equally uncomfortable to watch. Instead of containing a realized plot, the film is more of a character study on the people of a grotesque suburban community. Back in 2001, the film won the Grand Special Jury prize at the Venice Film Festival and ever since then people have been debating whether the film actually accomplishes anything significant. So it appears as though questioning its effectiveness is unavoidable, but at the same time, so are having reactions to the film. Sometimes any reaction at all can be considered a success, but it is hard to say this film succeeded on any other level.