Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
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.
This American remake of the acclaimed 2014 Austrian film strips away much of the original's unsettling ambiguity and cold European dread, replacing it with a more conventional horror-thriller framework. The twist, already familiar to anyone who saw the original, lands with diminished impact, and the screenplay adds little new to justify the retelling. The performances, particularly Naomi Watts, are competent but underserved by the material. Cinematography is serviceable without reaching the austere menace of the source. As a remake of a distinctive foreign-language film, its novelty score suffers considerably — it is by definition derivative of a superior, more original work.