Quality-wise, the Daniel Craig era of the James Bond franchise has been a fascinating game of tug-of-war for the past nine years. First we had Casino Royale, a fantastic revitalization of the Bond character that ranks among the very best films in the series. Then came Quantum of Solace, a befuddling and bombastic misfire that may be my least favorite Bond movie ever. Skyfall, which continued to build upon the winning themes of Casino Royale, opened four years later to overwhelming critical and financial success. Now we have Spectre, which is certainly not as poor as Quantum but nevertheless feels like a step backwards for Bond.

We begin in Mexico City during a Day of the Dead parade, where Bond is on unofficial assignment to take out two terrorists plotting to bomb a local football stadium. Upon traveling to Rome to attend the funereal of one of his victims, he also sneaks into a meeting for the shadowy organization SPECTRE, whose leader (played by Christoph Waltz) seems to have a close personal history with Bond. After a rendezvous in Austria to protect the daughter of a fellow assassin (played by Léa Seydoux), the two track down the organization’s covert headquarters and plan to shut down their nefarious plot to utilize mass surveillance for global domination.

What’s troubling about Spectre is just how hollow and obligatory the whole thing feels. There is evidence of some worthwhile ideas that were likely hatched early in the planning stages but instead of seeing these through, we’re instead given an almost insultingly rote series of action setpieces and dramatic “reveals”. On paper, this has all of the elements of a solid Bond movie but director Sam Mendes can’t seem to make things congeal the way that he did so effectively in Skyfall. Even the same screenwriting crew has been held over from that film (with the addition of one Jez Butterworth, whose name itself is too good not to mention) but it’s clear that something got lost in the mix.

Basic story elements like character motivation and relative realism remain stubbornly murky throughout most of the film but all of that seems to stem from the filmmakers’ modern conceptualization of Bond. It’s clear to me that they’ve lost their way in trying to figure out what this character is all about and more importantly, where they want him to go from here. He seems to be on “dark and brooding” auto-pilot since Quantum of Solace and this lack of depth in characterization is starting cast a dour shadow on the kinds of stories that can be written around him.

There are some worthy attempts at levity during this leaden story — a killer one-liner from Ralph Fiennes’ M in the third act being a highlight — but try as it might, this film will never have the kind of fun that the Mission Impossible series has been able to conjure up with its two most recent entries. Still, Bond has the opportunity to do what those films can’t do: to explore the psyche of a trained killer in a more serious and dramatically compelling way. That’s where Spectre should have had its focus but instead, it hedges its bets and leaves us with a mulligan of a movie.

We open with a child, maybe ten years old, as he runs through a cornfield and is then ambushed by his twin brother. They play games  like hide and seek outside together and we get the sense that they are inseparable. When Elias and Lukas (played by real-life twins Elias and Lukas Schwarz) return to their home, they find that their mother (played by Susanne Wuest) has come back from the hospital after surgery that has left her face heavily bandaged. Noticing a drastic change in their mother’s demeanor, the twins take on the notion that this woman may not be their real mother and take substantial action to gain the truth.

Put simply, psychological horror is rarely as unshakable and unsettling as Goodnight Mommy. Most films in the genre tend to over-explain their material, especially in the third act, but don’t come into this movie expecting expository flashbacks or heavy-handed voiceover narration. This is a film that is almost gleefully loaded with ambiguity, one that respects the intelligence of the audience and invites speculation on nearly every aspect of its story. Even as I’m writing now, I’m questioning the myriad of details that were presented during my viewing and trying to factor them into the larger context of the narrative.

But Goodnight Mommy also isn’t trying to outsmart its audience either; this isn’t typical puzzle box storytelling that requires a second watch to figure out what’s happening. With the exception of a few impressionistic scenes that seem to happen out of time or a strict sense of reality, the story is told with clinical precision and is kept to just a few characters and locations. Co-directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala wisely forgo scenes of backstory that would too overtly explain plot points that are much better left up to interpretation.

They also understand that the absence of stimulus can be much more terrifying than too much. The sound design and music score by Olga Neuwirth are both brilliantly sparing, neither giving into the easy moments to jolt the audience but rather staying out of the way as tension builds organically in each scene. Even the chilly looking lake house where the characters reside seems devoid of any decorative sentimentalities that would seem vaguely comforting. Even the film’s final shot, which I wouldn’t dare spoil, had me wincing away from the screen not because I was expecting a final scare but because it was so relentlessly creepy in a hauntingly simplistic way.

I should note that due to the deceptive nature of the trailer that was released for this film (which has incidentally received quite a bit of attention), I have instead linked to a short clip in the image above instead of linking to a full-length trailer like I normally do. It seems that American film distributors still struggle to marketing foreign films faithfully but on the other hand, perhaps it’s enough to give Goodnight Mommy a larger audience than it would not have had otherwise. It’s certainly worthy of one.