![]() The early scenes of the twins playing in nature are full of jagged, organic lines: the graceful curves of a lakeshore, the subtle crookedness of a tree. The stark cinematography of the film is also great. The most frightening explanation, however, is possibly the most pedestrian: the film is documenting two children struggling to understand, for the first time, how a life-changing event can permanently alter a person. It’s more likely that we’re seeing the onset of a Capgras delusion : a pernicious belief that someone you love has been secretly replaced. (So why did I write that whole last paragraph? Probably because I like to share Spooky Facts.) While there are moments in the film that seem supernatural, we learn that the twins are prone to having waking nightmares and flights of fancy: it’s remains ambiguous how much of the inexplicable things we’re being shown are “real” and how much is simply the twins trying to process a sudden change in their mother’s behavior. I honestly don’t know how widespread the Roggenmuhme is in Germany, much less Austria, but I can tell you as a little German lad growing up in Indiana they were something I was very, very concerned with.īut I think that Goodnight Mommy intentionally baits and refutes such pat explanations. ![]() ![]() This one is a creature which hunts down children who wander into her cornfield, squeezing them to death in a deadly hug or, in some stories, forcing them to suckle molten iron from her fright bosoms. It’s one of Germany’s many field spirits. It is perhaps unsurprising that the concept of having a dark twin strikes such a chord in the German-speaking world – a gorgeous place full of beautiful, kind, compassionate people which, within living memory, was near-globally synonymous with ontological evil.ĭue to the film’s recurring image of a cornfield, it’s probably also worth mentioning the Roggenmuhme (“Rye Mommy”), a German legend mentioned by the Brothers Grimm. Traditionally, seeing one’s doppelgänger isn’t just a passing moment of “huh, weird” or, if you’re a roguishly handsome Internet comedy writer, extreme eroticism: it’s usually a mark of impending disaster, a harbinger of doom. The word doppelgänger first started appearing in the late 18th century, meaning that the United States is technically older than doppelgängers and therefore might be partially to blame for their existence. We’re all probably familiar with the concept of the doppelgänger – an identical, yet separate, copy of someone. The most knee-jerk interpretation of the film is that it deals with the concept of the doppelgänger, and one need only look at that umlaut to know this particular phenomenon has its origin in the German-speaking world.
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