Editor’s Note: This essay contains spoilers.
The most immediately impressive aspect of Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s
chilling feature Goodnight Mommy is how quickly the film conjures a buzzing
atmosphere of
There is a serious danger in praising a television show for its choice of
subject matter instead of its acting, composition, or production quality: at
that point you are talking about the creators’
Pseudo-spiritual self-help memoirs line bookstore shelves, instructing us how to
use our breath to get happy. Hot Yoga classes with a side of watered-down
Buddhism shape our bodies and minds, selling self-actualization like
Numerous science fiction films tell the story of artificial intelligences
rebelling against their human creators. Recently, in Marvel’s Age of Ultron,
Tony Stark accidentally creates Ultron, an embodied AI bent on creating
Hollywood has released a feature film starring the scientific method. In Ridley
Scott’s The Martian, special effects take the backseat to a computer from 1996,
and hexadecimal digits and botany unexpectedly upstage
