Mama is creepy, but not fully realized
By Sarah Bohuch
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: once upon a time two children enter the cold, dark woods, only to experience tragedy when their mother is mysteriously taken from them. After much wandering, they come across a small cottage. It looks abandoned, but in reality it’s not, and neither are the surrounding woods. No, not ringing any bells?
I’m a sucker for a good ghost story, and one seemed to present itself in Andres Muschietti’s Mama. The story itself deals with Victoria and Lily, two sisters who are found in an abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods five years after they went missing from their home. After their rescue (and time at a special clinic) they are taken home by their uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of Game of Thrones fame) and his girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain from Zero Dark Thirty). As they all learn to make a new family together, strange things begin to happen around the house, rapidly escalating in both violence and scope. Something, it seems, has followed the girls home from the woods.
The film’s high points are incredible, but these high points take up little screen time. One of the most disturbing moments of the film takes place when the girls are initially found, and it becomes clear that something mysterious has happened to them and they are no longer normal. They skitter around the cabin on all fours, darting from shadow to shadow, seemingly incapable of speech. The only word they do know, which they repeat over and over, is “Mama.”
The less-than-applause worthy moments, however, stick out sorely. The movie makes efforts to drive home the fact that Annabel is edgy and alternative. One of these scenes is during the first meeting of Annabel with the girls’ shrink. She’s hostile to him for no real reason, and the occasion doesn’t call for it since he is advising on proper care of these two obviously emotionally damaged young girls. This happens again later in the movie when she is discussing visitation rights to the girl’s aunt. The situation is an unhappy and uncomfortable one for all of the characters but yet again she is pointlessly aggressive to a woman whose sister has died and has done nothing to warrant it other then put in a bid for custody when the girls were found (which isn’t so unreasonable, given that these are her sister’s kids). The movie also has a scene in which Annabel is playing with her band, which serves no point other than to drive home the fact that yes, she does play bass in a real band. It does nothing to advance the plot, as if the audience would not believe such assertions about her character otherwise. It got to the point where every time the character did anything that was meant to advance this characterization (like acting like a pointless prick) my cousin and I would laugh to each other and say something to the effect of: “It’s okay. She’s in a rock band.”
The heavy-handed “telling, not showing” became ingratiating, and made it difficult for us to fully immerse ourselves in the world of the film. While the film was certainly very creepy, it wasn’t wholly realized. If you are in the market for a ghost story with disturbed children, atmospheric dark houses, and a terrible mystery in the woods, then I would recommend this one, but if you’re looking for the next Shining, you’d best look elsewhere.
