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62%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #1,009
...out of 20,875 movies
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Jeffrey Desange, senior partner of an investment brokerage, has a breakdown after a financial collapse and kills several co-workers and his estranged wife and kidnaps his two young daughters, Victoria and Lily. When they're found five years later, they're taken in by their uncle (their father's twin brother) and his girlfriend. Macabre events soon make the new guardians suspect that a supernatural evil force named Mama has attached itself to the girls.
--IMDb
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Review by Crispy
Added: February 2, 2013
I've been waiting a long time since I've seen the first trailer for Mama. I've always been a sucker for ghost movies, and thankfully, it hasn't been flooded out like the zombie genre has. Still, you've got to be weary when those PG-13 horror movies come out.
I'm sure you remember the economy taking a massive nosedive about half a decade ago, and as everything else in life, some people took that a bit more seriously than most. Take Jeffery Desange for example; he completely loses his shit, kills his wife and some coworkers, picks up his two daughters, Victoria and Lilly, and after crashing his car in the mountain woods, takes them to an abandoned cabin to finish the murder-suicide. Just before he pulls the trigger though, a horribly twisted ghost materializes and kills him. She begins to care for the girls, who refer to her as Mama. Meanwhile, Jeffery's twin brother, Lucas, spends the next five years wiping out his bank account trying to find them. His girlfriend, punk rocker Annabelle, supports him even though she has zero intention of being a mom anytime soon. Guess she figured the chances of finding them weren't good, but we wouldn't have a movie if she was right. Lucas' hunters stumble across the cabin and discover that the two girls are alive, but the five years alone in the wilderness have essentially made them feral. Still, after a few weeks of counseling, the older sister, Victoria, begins to regain her humanity, and they relocate to Uncle Lucas' house. However, it quickly becomes apparent that their spectral surrogate mother for five years wasn't just going to let her children be taken away from her, and she's none to happy about these people taking her kids away.
In his directorial debut, Andres Muschietti made a few interesting decisions, but for the most part they worked out for him. The first thing I noticed is that he wasn't having of that "not seeing the ghost until the end" trope, and Mama was in full view basically from the get-go. Sure, she was a little blurry due to some POV shots with broken glasses, but it wasn't the same as keeping it off-camera for the duration of the movie. While it was nice to see something different, by film's end it becomes obvious that there's a reason that film makers use this trick. The overall scariness of the movie drops quite a few notches when you see exactly what you're up against. After all, your mind knows what scares you the most, which is why most films are content to let it fill in the blanks for as long as possible. When you take that away, things automatically drop a level from scary to creepy. Mama is certainly creepy (feral children skittering around on all fours are most-definitely unnerving, and the under-the-bed scene certainly ranks up there among the best), but the uneasiness ended when the credits started to roll. With the better ghost movies, it'll resurface while lying in bed that night, as it did with say, Paranormal Activity. On top of that, there were a few cliched tricks he seemed to be a fan of. Chief among them is the tried and true queuing up the orchestra as the character slowly reaches for the doorknob, and the slightly lesser used game of making the audience think the sisters are playing with each other, before cutting to one of them in a different room and we realize she's actually been playing with Mama the whole time. Fortunately he didn't over do it, and hopefully with more experience he'll find himself less reliant on the gimmicks.
For the most part, the majority of the film's effectiveness was rested on the shoulders of Jessica Chastain's Annabelle. You see, Lucas is hospitalized by Mama early on, leaving Annabelle alone with the kids. Bottom line is that the strength of her performance was in a position to either make or break the film. I'm sure it's no surprise that the Academy Award nominated actress was more than up to the task. She transitions seamlessly from the cold, reluctant rocker forced to deal with two feral kids to a more protective mother figure as she warms up to them. Obviously, it's always harder playing a character in transition, but she nailed both halves beautifully. Speaking of the kids, who'd have thought those two would actually be one of the movie's stronger assets? Sure, keeping Isabelle Nélisse in an introverted, pseudo-feral role masked any deficiencies due to age, but she truly looked happy whenever she was playing with Mama. There were no such masks for Megan Charpentier, however, yet she still handled Victoria beautifully. And when you realize that, like Chastain, she was playing a character in transition, shifting from a catatonic wreck to a normal girl, it becomes apparent that this child-actor has quite a future ahead of her. Here's hoping she doesn't turn 18 and go all Lindsay Lohan / Miley Cyrus on us.
At the end of the day, I liked Mama. It wasn't quite the scarefest I was hoping for, and I'm not sure I'll ever go out of my way to add it to my DVD collection, but it was a fun ninety minutes. Also, I'd really like to see what Muschietti has in store for the future. He didn't knock his debut out of the park per se, but he's certainly got his foot in the door. 6/10.
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