Nerdy Rotten Scoundrel: Film Review

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Film Review - MAMA ★★☆☆☆

If you are looking for your creepy kid movie fix, look no further than Mama, a little horror thriller from first-time director Andy Muschietti and executive producer Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, Hellboy).

Based on Muschietti's short film of the same name, Mama stars Jessica Chastain (currently riding high on her red hot Oscar nominated turn in Zero Dark Thirty) and Game of Thrones' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, and provides enough creeps and chills to secure you to your seat. It's not to say that Mama doesn't a borrow a healthy helping of creepy imagery from Japanese ghost stories like The Ring and The Grudge (and to a certain extent The Exorcist as well), but for this film the less-is-more approach is not really in the cards. You're kinda in the know surprisingly early on as to what's up with the ghostly title character.

When a distraught father murders his wife following a huge financial setback, he flees to a cabin in the woods with his two daughters only to be consumed by a ghostly presence right before he can complete the grisly task of taking out the rest of his family. The girls are left abandoned in the remote forest with only the mysterious apparition to watch over them. Five years later, they are found in none too good shape by a rescue team funded by their starving artist Uncle Lucas (Coster-Waldau). Miraculously alive, but nonetheless detached, filthy and feral, Victoria (Megan Carpenter) and Lilly (Isabelle Nelisse) are brought back to civilization and put in the care of Lucas and his reluctant girlfriend Annabel. And that's when the creepy begins.

The kids may have left the cabin behind, but Mama did not let them go without a fight, and a haunted house custody battle ensues. The convincing young girls provide a solid anchor to the film whose assimilation back into the normal world is impeded by a ghost in the form of a rotting floating corpse. Complete with a chilling spider walk, the younger sibling Lilly has a worse time breaking away from Mama's maternal grip, still attached to the other worldly creature with little fear and a creepy childlike wonder.

Some films choose to keep their monsters in the shadows, but the over possessive Mama is revealed prowling around surprisingly early on. Films like this can sometimes boil down to how complicated they make the villain's motivation before the inevitable climatic showdown. Do you make your antagonist ultimately a sympathetic creature, or are you dealing with pure evil that must be destroyed at all costs? Fans like me prefer their villains to be straight up evil who have no remorse or backstory to justify their actions. Others stick on the side of getting into the 'why?' of it all. Given the film's title and Chastain's Annabel being an inked-up goth rocker with little initial connection to children, an eventual power play on paternal instincts figures high on the agenda.

There is little mystery left to solve by the third act, and by that point you are far more invested in Victoria and Lilly than any of the adults who are reduced to simply reacting to all of the strange goings on. Mama plays it too safe all around, and its PG-13 rating keeps the potential gore quotient to a bare bones minimum.

The genre overall is getting tougher to crack when it comes to standout fare, and sometimes the overall premise here is scarier than the actual execution. There are plenty of boogeyman bumps-in-the-night moments, several cliche horror movie missteps and expendable supporting characters you know have zero chance of making it to the final credits. But with solid performances by the two young leads (Lilly provides more chills than many of Mama's "Hey! Look at me!" CGI sequences), the film just manages to scare up enough haunted house supernatural thrills to keep it afloat.