Film promises scares despite dropped subplots, expected tricks
Mother knows best. Mother scares best.
Both sayings are at the center of the premise for director Andres Muschietti’s debut film “Mama,” a movie that, like “The Omen” and “The Orphanage,” eerily mixes childhood innocence with the supernatural and the deranged.
Even though it has some of the standard horror clichés, “Mama” still isn’t your typical low-budget, shock-and-scare exercise; it’s “presented” by horror/fantasy visionary Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy”), and it stars Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain, not the kind of person you’d see in a typical ghost story.
The movie begins with a forceful and promising prologue. After killing his co-workers and ex-wife, a man (Nicolaj Coster-Waldau) kidnaps his two daughters and flees into the snowy woods. He then wanders with the girls into a ramshackle cabin in the middle of the woods (you know, the cliche haunted house in the middle of nowhere). While the father prepares a double murder–suicide, “something” evil emerges and drags him away, leaving the girls alone with only this creature for company.
The story picks up five years later when the girls, Victoria and Lilly, are discovered living on their own in the cabin. Feral and distrusting of people, the girls are examined by a psychiatrist (Daniel Kash) before being released into the custody of their uncle Lucas (Coster-Waldau, again) and his goth-rocker girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain). Annabel is reluctant to raise the girls alone after Lucas suffers a sudden “accident” as she doesn’t see motherhood as the perfect life.
Chastain continues to show what a chameleon she is in the acting world, going from stressed-out CIA agent (“Zero Dark Thirty”) to a Joan Jett look-alike rock chick with a menacing octopus tattooed on her arm. Changing shift to a more low-key performance, Chastain is believable and graceful while channeling Annabel’s growing feelings for the young siblings.
The jump-in-your-seat stingers start when Annabel soon realizes that the girls may have brought a “friend” home with them — the creature they call “Mama” that helped them survive all those years in the cabin. Unfortunately, when Muschietti’s wraith reveals herself, she turns out to be a badly visualized bit of CGI, with spindly cockroach limbs and a face like a hatchet.
Visual trickery and pleasing moments of discovery let the audience in on Mama’s existence, even though they’re partially what make the movie pretty cliched. Either the flickering of lights or the presence of moths indicate that Mama is somewhere in the shadows. There’s also the overused “why would you open the closet when the door’s right over there?” scene.
“Mama” also has a little pacing issue. The movie unveils slowly, with too little story to fill the 100-minute runtime. It often resorts to repeating itself or relies on the jump scares to keep the audience’s attention from wandering when nothing else is going on. There are plenty of intriguing subplots, but they’re quickly dropped or abruptly concluded in favor of the characters just doing all the “stupid horror things.”
However, “Mama” does accomplish what it sets out to do — scare us from start to finish. This is mostly thanks to young Megan Charpentier as Victoria and Isabelle Nelisse as the creepy Lilly, whose smile would melt your heart if it wasn’t so scary to look at. Even after they ceased their animalistic habits and behave like sweet girls, they neatly balance pure terror with playful giggling.
If you want to see a horror film just to get the wits scared out of you, “Mama” is one frightfully entertaining film.