Yet another chilling insight into the deviant human behaviour by the spouse of the trenchant critic of Austrian society, Ulrich Seidl.
In the heat of the summer, ten-year-old twins wait for their mother in an isolated house in the countryside, situated between woods and corn fields. When she comes back, her head wrapped in bandages after plastic surgery, nothing is as it was before. Stern and distant now, she shuts the family off from the outside world. Starting to doubt that this woman is actually their mother, the boys are determined to find the truth by any means.
»We love physical cinema, movies that overpower you, movies that are not simply about a concept or telling a story, but rather ones that show people sweating, trembling, screaming, crying, bleeding, and where the sweating, trembling, screaming, crying and bleeding are also communicated to the viewer’s body. That’s the kind of movie we wanted to make. But a movie that at the same time adhered to a certain naturalism. We were interested in a certain kind of horror, one that grows out of daily life and is rooted in reality and in very simple things: a bandaged face, a sentence, a magnifying glass, dental floss.« (Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala)
Veronika Franz
Born in Vienna in 1965, Franz has been active in all fields of cinematic art and film criticism: film journalist, assistant director, casting director, philosophy student, saleswoman. Ulrich Seidl’s wife, she has worked as co-scriptwriter and artistic collaborator on all of his films since The Bosom Friend (1997).
Severin Fiala
Born in Vienna in 1985, Fiala has been making films since the age of 11. Having made a number of shorts, he established a scriptwriting and filmmaking partnership with Veronika Franz in 2012.
joint filmography
2012 Kern (documentary)
2013 Dreh & Trink (Shoot & Drink) (documentary short)
2014 Ich seh, Ich seh (Goodnight Mommy/Lahko noč, mamica)