MAMA REVIEW

About The Movie:

Mama, a supernatural thriller that tells the haunting tale of two little girls who disappeared into the woods the day that their mother was murdered. When they are rescued years later and begin a new life, they find that someone or something still wants to come tuck them in at night.

The day their father killed their mother, sisters Victoria and Lilly vanished near their suburban neighborhood. For five long years, their Uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend, Annabel (Jessica Chastain), have been madly searching for them. But when, incredibly, the kids are found alive in a decrepit cabin, the couple wonders if the girls are the only guests they have welcomed into their home.

As Annabel tries to introduce the children to a normal life, she grows convinced of an evil presence in their house. Are the sisters experiencing traumatic stress, or is a ghost coming to visit them? How did the broken girls survive those years all by themselves? As she answers these disturbing questions, the new mother will find that the whispers she hears at bedtime are coming from the lips of a deadly presence.

What Is Good/Bad About The Movie:

Yes, just months after the release of both The Possession and Sinister comes yet another movie about spooky children and the demons that haunt them, and much like the previous titles Mama falls right in line. The film reuses tropes like escaped mental patients and grieving mothers and old ladies who know about the spirit world and does so with zero enthusiasm or creativity. The result is a story that’s okay and tame, spiced up only occasionally with cheap jump scares, that warns you they’re coming. Instead of creating any kind of tension the plot just moves from scene to scene, with characters picking up hints about the mystery and hiding them so that it all can all pay off in the end. The way the story moves is so predictable that by the time the reveals begin you’re not invested, because it’s all been so clear from the start.

In some cases the film even goes as far as to undercut the scares it does have, specifically by overusing CGI. When Victoria and Lily are first discovered in the woods and have gone completely feral they’re creepy enough on their own, walking around on all fours and scampering and jumping around the cabin. Any eeriness to it, however, is totally removed when the children move in a completely unnatural way – clearly helped by visual effects – despite the fact that there’s nothing unnatural about them. The wild kids offer the movie an opportunity at real-world based scares, but instead it’s all just blurred in with the rest.

In a completely different way the CGI hurts the spooky character of Mama as well. Usually seen crawling out of walls/floors/ceilings and/or floating off the ground, it’s not hard to understand why Muschietti felt that he had to digitize the film’s villain, but it stands out in a bad way. Each time the spirit appears it’s distracting how detached it is from the rest of the scene. The film isn’t completely without moments where the Mama effect works – most notably in the final scenes – but they’re few and far between. 

Overall Grade: B-