In Review: Mama

Directed By: Andres Muschietti
Stars: Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, a CGI poltergeist

What I Liked
Cinematography by Antonio Riestra provides a creepy atmosphere full of scares and surprises

What I Disliked
Pedestrian resolution, throws a bunch of potentials that it never fully develops

Gist
It's a frightfest executed with creepy visual style, but Mama is flush of potentials that it never fully develops--giving itself to a rather pedestrian idea of an ending.

After being left to fend for themselves for five years, the Desange sisters were found alone in a cabin in the woods. They were remote from human: feral, savage, and running on all fours. Their uncle, a spitting image of their father, and his girlfriend, claims them and fends for them. But a shadowy, jealous guardian that they call Mama has followed them to their new home, unable to let go and ever wanting to whisk them away from their new family.

There is little doubt after one look at Chastain's wig that this film would be scary. If you guessed like I did, you're more than right. Mama is indeed scary. Not in The Hills Have Eyes or Texas Chainsaw Massacre scary, but in an Insidious, The Grudge, or The Eye (original Asians versions of the latter two) scary. But who is this Andres Muschietti? To most of us, he is a first time director, and the probable reason you are watching this film is because 1.) you heard Guillermo del Toro is producing (or in my case, I thought he was directing), 2.) you like either Chastain or Coster-Waldau or 3.) You have no idea who those people are and you just heard from your friends that this movie is nuts (actually, del Toro directed Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy, Chastain is Zero Dark Thirty's Maya, and Coster-Waldau is Game of Thrones' Jamie Lannister, but you probably know that anyway). Anyways, Muschietti.

Andres Muschietti created in 2011 a short film called Mama, stress on the last a, that caught del Toro's imagination. Below is that video where del Toro justifies why he produced Mama as well as the full short film itself (actually 3 minutes long only but is way scarier than the full-length film itself). The scene has an identical in the movie. So, if you haven't seen the movie, I would advise against watching it just yet.

If your reason is number 3, then your friends are right. Mama is crazy nuts scary, one that would work better on the cinemas as a sort of a communal screaming event. The cinematography invites a certain atmosphere of creepiness in a suburban setting that unsettles. Hands down also to the acting of the two little girls, Charpentier and Nelisse were very good at portraying nature-raised jungle children, hostile to any modern form of social interaction. The score also contributed to the largely creep-out feel of the film. Of course, there was a lot of CGI use. Mama is full-on CGI and everytime she appears, CG artists get paid.

At the start of the film, you would think that this is going to be a largely psychological horror movie, with most scares coming from the psychological terror of an unknown house intruder inflicted upon its cast, and it attempted this to good effect. Eventually, though, this idea is dispelled as Muschietti's monster become ever more visible. The more the Desange orphans feel human, the more monstrous Mama is, and the more abandoned the psychological terror is, making it clear that this is a creature feature rather than a psychological purveying of any sorts.

Some day, Chastain would look at this wig and think it was
all worth it.

Chastain's character, a rocker chick who you'd think would guest star on an episode of Jackass just for the hell of it, slowly develops maternal instincts just because. There's no explanation how she'd acquire the parental skills required to rear two jungle rats other than the fact that she was with them for days on her own (and probably for the love of her boyfriend). It's just hard to imagine how a woman on her late 20s (or early 30s) who'd praise the Lord for getting negative on a pregnancy test wouldn't immediately run and return these children to foster care. I mean it's not really that bad, but come on, we can do with some depth in the character development.

Anyway, all that lack of depth in character development makes the movie feel faster than it should be, trading away dialogue and heart for more scares. And it does feel scary, especially with the score and the cinematography (and all that grunge and moth and Nelisse acting all jungle book and shit). But as the movie reaches its third act, everything feels so unimaginative and derivative already--a common pitfall in almost all horror movies is that they don't know how to end themselves after delivering several scares. As with most horror movies, everything is revealed in the end, explained, and ends as unimaginative as you can get (but, in all fairness, not as shaky a resolution as Insidious). By the time it's about to end you know, like the whole movie, the resolution will compromise.

It frustrates me, that we couldn't really have a horror movie nowadays with an ending that 1.) doesn't feel cheesy or 2.) feels like a femme fatale movie or 3.) just doesn't have a heart or 4.) makes you think it's planning a sequel. Mama attempts and ending that is satisfying and has a heart, but its methods are too unimaginative to pull it off. Yes, I loved Mama, and I wish it was a bit better than it is. As it is, it's a frightfest executed with creepy visual style, and Mama is flush of potentials that it never fully develops. In the end, it gives itself to a rather pedestrian idea of an ending and that just feels a bit too much of a wasted opportunity.

Judgment: 3.3 out of 5 stars

For this movie, I'm willing to pay, 170 to 190 pesos.