Goodnight Mommy (2022)
Directed by Matt Sobel
No — Goodnight Mommy is not woke, scoring 4 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Goodnight Mommy arrives as a remake of a 2014 Austrian film that nobody, in the intervening eight years, had asked to see remade.
Consciousness Markers
The cast is overwhelmingly white, with Crystal Lucas-Perry in a minor supporting role as Sandy; this is natural, unremarked casting rather than a representational statement.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
The mother is a central figure but is framed as an ambiguous, potentially sinister antagonist; there is no feminist thesis or commentary on gender.
The film engages no racial themes, dynamics, or commentary whatsoever.
No environmental or climate-related content is present.
No economic critique or class-based messaging appears in the narrative.
The film centers on cosmetic surgery and bandaged appearance as a source of horror and suspicion, which is thematically at odds with body positivity rather than aligned with it.
The boy's hallucinations stem from trauma and grief as a horror plot device, not from any neurodivergence representation or advocacy.
The film makes no historical claims and revises no historical record.
The film is a tight psychological horror piece with no didactic messaging or moralizing.
Why it received this score
Goodnight Mommy arrives as a remake of a 2014 Austrian film that nobody, in the intervening eight years, had asked to see remade. Naomi Watts plays a mother who returns from cosmetic surgery with her head wrapped in gauze, and her twin sons, played by the Crovetti brothers, spend the rest of the running time deciding whether the woman under the bandages is their mother at all. The premise is sturdy. The execution is a well-lit shrug. Critics were unkind, and the film earned its shrug honestly.
Our ledger of contemporary social markers finds almost nothing to record here, and the film's indifference is total. The horror engine is the mother's surgically altered face, treated as evidence of imposture, which places the material at some distance from the body-affirming currents of the decade. Elias's hallucinations are the machinery of a twist ending, and grief is deployed as a genre device instead of a platform. There is no racial commentary, no economic critique, no environmental sermon, no gender thesis, and no historical revision on offer. The cast is white with a single exception: Crystal Lucas-Perry appears briefly as Sandy, a supporting part that carries no argument and asks for none. Such casting is ordinary and unremarked, which is why it registers at the lowest nonzero setting we maintain.
The result is a chilly, derivative chamber piece that mistakes restraint for dread and bandages for atmosphere. The original film had a nastier pulse; this one has Naomi Watts, who is good, and little else. We classify it without pleasure. A horror film can be many things, and this one has chosen to be merely quiet.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
When twin brothers arrive home to find their mother’s demeanor altered and face covered in surgical bandages, they begin to suspect the woman beneath the gauze might not be their mother.
Questions about Goodnight Mommy
Is Goodnight Mommy woke?
No — Goodnight Mommy is not woke, scoring 4 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Goodnight Mommy have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 10.
How does Goodnight Mommy compare to other 2022 movies?
It ranks #194 of the 223 films from 2022 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is Bros (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.