Ich Seh Ich Seh: Not Everything Is What It Seems, But You Kind Of Already Know That

The trick to a good mystery is keeping information back from the audience until just the right time. I mean, the clue’s in the name - mysteries require keeping things mysterious, so that the reveal is meaningful and affects the audience’s understanding and experience of the story. If, in a scary movie, you’re trying to create an atmosphere of unease, or paranoia, or a sense that there’s something wrong but you can’t quite put your finger on it, then withholding information in order to reveal it at a dramatic moment is a really solid way to do that.

But it requires that you not give things away too soon, which is where Ich Seh Ich Seh (I See I See, released in the U.S. as Goodnight Mommy) drops the ball. It’s slow-paced, unsettling, and atmospheric for a good part of its runtime, but there’s a lot less mystery there than it thinks, and the film suffers as a result.

We open on a lazy summer day in the Austrian countryside, where brothers Lukas and Elias are playing hide-and-seek in a cornfield. It seems like one of those days you only have when you’re a little kid, free of all responsibility and content to go where they day takes you. They live in a fancy modern home, far away from the city. It looks like the summer home of someone who doesn’t have to worry about money. And then, at some point, their mother comes home. She’s been in the hospital, having some plastic surgery done, and so she arrives, unrecognizable with her head swathed in bandages. She needs to rest, she needs to avoid the sun, she needs peace and quiet and to be left alone.

She isn’t acting like their mother at all.

So almost from the get-go, everything seems slightly…off. The acting in general is a little on the inert side, but it works with the mood that’s established. Their mother seems cold and distant, but especially so when contrasted with a home recording that Elias plays, of her singing them a lullaby and telling them how much she loves them. For some reason, she won’ t speak to Lukas directly, as if he’s done something unforgivable. She doesn’t even want to acknowledge him, and when Elias asks why she won’t, she just says “you know why.” It feels harsh, and vindictive. She’s hard to connect with. Late at night, she goes out into the woods, takes off all the bandages, and screams. It’s just the three of them, out in the country, and the emptiness surrounding them is tangible, expressed through lots of long, static shots of empty rooms and surrounding countryside with no other people to be seen. There are all kinds of odd touches - first, her presence, face mostly obscured, evokes films like Eyes Without A Face and Hellraiser 2, so her just standing there is kind of unnerving. For some reason Lukas and Elias collect hissing cockroaches in a big terrarium. Blinds keep getting raised and lowered, the boys sneak around the house so they don’t disturb their mother, and she gets disturbed very easily, by all kinds of things. The vibe is very sinister, without clearly pointing to a specific outcome. Even little things seem faintly wrong.

At least, that’s how it starts, going by slowly as one day becomes another and the boys wonder what happened to their mother, with a constant undercurrent of unease. But then about 20 minutes in, a major plot point gets revealed. It’s not the filmmakers telling us outright, they’re not revealing the big twist in the first act like some other movies do. No, it’s just something we aren’t supposed to be aware of quite yet, but the way scenes are staged and the way some dialogue is written, it inadvertently gives the game away, and the film deflates as a result, because it turns what should be a startling revelation that recontextualizes everything that went before into a foregone conclusion. We stop trying to figure out what the fuck is going on well before the end of the first act, and so it ends up being an hour or so of knowing exactly what is going on and just sort of waiting to see how it turns out. This was also a problem with the filmmakers’ later film The Lodge, which shares a lot of thematic and character beats with this film, remixed and relocated, but very much a variation on a theme. In that film, information that would have had a real impact if it had been held back until the end of the first or even second act is explicitly revealed in the first 10 minutes or so, and it sucks a lot of the air out of the room. In both cases, a revelation is supposed to be just that, a revelation, but instead just ends up being affirmation of something that anyone paying attention to the film has already figured out well before the other shoe drops. Here it doesn’t feel like a conscious choice, like it is in The Lodge (and clumsily handled, at that), but the effect is the same.

And then, on top of that, it shifts in the third act to something much darker, nastier, and violent than the first two-thirds of the film. It makes sense narratively, but tonally it’s really jarring. You’ve settled in expecting diffuse creepiness, nefarious goings-on, a world slightly out of kilter, and then out of nowhere it turns absolutely brutal. By this point the outlines of the situation are completely spelled out and in terms of what’s really going on, there are no surprises left. And in some ways, that makes the third act even more grueling, knowing the reality of the situation and what’s likely to come, and indeed it ends with a bleakness that is almost punishing. Maybe the filmmakers did us a favor by tipping their hand early, because all of it crashing down at once might just be too much. But somehow I think what really happened was that they just thought they were being more subtle than they actually were, and the big revelation isn’t a big revelation because we’ve known for most of the movie and we’re just waiting for it to end. The result is something that manages to be anticlimactic and shocking at the same time, and it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.

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