‘Goodnight Mommy’ Trailer: Naomi Watts Is the Mother from Hell in Amazon Remake

Samantha Bergeson
·2 min read
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Twenty years since “The Ring” and Naomi Watts is still terrifying audiences.

Austrian hit 2014 film “Goodnight Mommy” is reimagined for Amazon Prime Video, with Watts taking over the lead role as a bandaged mother who appears to have undergone facial cosmetic surgery. However, once she returns home to her twin sons (Cameron and Nicholas Crovetti), they realize something is very, very wrong. Is this really their mother, or an imposter?

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Peter Hermann also stars in the film, with Matt Sobel (2015 Sundance sleeper “Take Me to the River”) directing from a script by Kyle Warren (“Lethal Weapon” series). “Goodnight Mommy” premieres September 16 on Prime Video.

Director Sobel, who most recently contributed episodes to Netflix’s 2021 “Brand New Cherry Flavor,” said he wanted to lean more toward the psychological thriller genre as opposed to horror for this remake. While it may seem unnecessary to some fans to remake a beloved horror favorite that isn’t even a decade old, Sobel saw a fresh path into the material.

“I saw an opportunity to preserve this unique mixture while injecting a completely new set of themes we wanted to explore,” Sobel told People. “If I had to point to a key difference between the films, I’d say the original is more interested in tone and aesthetic, while our reimagining favors character and psychology.”

The 2014 original film “Goodnight Mommy” was helmed by co-directing team Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz and focused on the coming-of-age realization that parents are really just people, too. Fiala recalled to IndieWire at the time of release that the film caused people to faint in theaters over its shocking scenes. (It played festivals before serving as Austria’s submission for the 2015 International Feature Oscar.)

Naomi Watts is next set to start in Ryan Murphy’s long-awaited second installment of the “Feud” anthology series for FX, which last saw Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange playing Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in 2017. The new set of episodes, directed by Gus Van Sant, centers on the various high-society New York women in Truman Capote’s life, with Watts playing socialite Barbara “Babe” Paley.

“Goodnight Mommy” premieres September 16 on Prime Video.

Check out the trailer below.

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