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Goodbye Mother opens with the shot of an antique record player spinning, with the infamous Mr Sandman looping. We are then exposed to the surroundings of a prestige bedroom, with an elderly woman lying on the bed. Upon closer inspection, it is obvious that the woman is dead. Thanks to Rhianna Angell’s direction and detailed choreography, ‘Goodbye Mother’ manipulates the audience into thinking the film is going in one direction, whereas it’s going in another.
This living hell fairy tale is proven to be an adventurous journey for both the audience and the young girl in the film, who is given no name or dialogue. Despite eerie parallels with appalling real-life news stories, Goodbye Mother is neither a horror film nor a film about crime and captivity. Rhianna Angell, the director and editor is clear that “we’re not marketing it as a horror film, yes death is involved, but it is dignified and is not based on the traditional ‘psycho’ horror killings”. She also stresses that potential viewers shouldn’t be “clear on where it ends up”. Instead, it focuses on how the human spirit may transcend physical and emotional boundaries, and the disparity between surviving and living.
As for the performances, Vanessa Williams, as nameless daughter, and Emma Watermeyer as Mother, are nothing short of perfect as the central couple around whom this trembling universe revolves.. Where other film-makers might have resorted to elaborate visualisations, Angell has the intelligence to trust her cast to show the audience the world through their eyes.
Williams gives a powerful performance, which has earned her an award at the latest LA short film festival, with more prizes potentially on the way. She is very good at conveying the nauseous wretchedness of her life: the strain of concealing the truth from the audience, or rather the strain of behaving as if the truth does not exist.
This movie is set in the US and it does not have the same sort of brutal Euro-hardcore feel. Arguably, Angell’s film is a truer representation of the subject. But that doesn’t mean Goodbye Mother is in some way evasive or emollient. Not at all. It keeps a clear, cold gaze on what is happening.
What defines the girl and mother’s lives is gradually revealed; they are prisoners, kept in their home, with a fear of the outside. The girl has constructed survival strategies for them both – a daily life of ritual and routine, of play, familiar objects and comfort. She has constructed an explanation for the audience of what she is doing there.

The film is in two distinct halves: life in the home and life beyond it. The girl conceives of an escape plan, executed in a way that’s as tense and suspenseful as any thriller, with a new dynamic of constraint. Her world expands, as does the world of the film, yet there is confinement and trauma here too. Watermeyer, playing the mother, contributes in deftly judged performances to a poignant, utterly plausible scenario in which escape doesn’t necessarily mean deliverance, in which mother and child have to relearn their relationship and move, with varying degrees of difficulty, to a new understanding of what they mean to each other.

My double page spread article