Mama Review

Mother issues -- and mothers with issues -- are nothing new to the horror genre. You've got the moms who torture and haunt (Norman Bates' mommy, Carrie's overzealous matriarch, Pamela Voorhees) and the moms who get haunted (Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, The Omen's Lee Remick, Ellen Burstyn by way of Regan MacNeil). And now, with executive-producer Guillermo del Toro's moody and unsettling Mama, we have a mother who haunts another mother!

It's a battle of the selfish Mamas, this film, with one woman reaching from beyond the grave to take care of the children she has no right to be with, and the other woman (Zero Dark Thirty's Jessica Chastain) -- the rightful, you know, alive parental figure -- wanting to more or less escape the drudgery of the domestic life that these kids have forced upon her.

It all starts with Game of Thrones' Kingslayer, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, as Jeffrey, absconding away with his two young daughters in a fit of madness, murder and planned suicide. They wind up in a cabin in the frozen woods (so many cabins in the woods in these movies!), where a mysterious, unearthly force lurches out of the shadows and disposes of him, saving the two girls. It's Mama!

From there, a beautiful and nifty opening credits sequence lays out the next five years of the children's lives through a series of kids' drawings… creepy as hell kids' drawings as it becomes clear that something has been living with these girls, Victoria and Lilly, all these years, caring for them in its way.

Cut to the present and we see that Jeffrey's twin brother Lucas, also played by Coster-Waldau, has maintained a tireless search for the kids since their disappearance, while his gothy, I'm-with-the-band girlfriend Annabel (a barely recognizable Chastain) rides it all out in between her bass-playing, beer-swilling sessions. Of course, the kids are soon found -- in a mostly feral state -- and come to live with artist Lucas and rocker Annabel in a suburbia that is nightmarish in a totally non-horror movie way for the hipsters. And they don't even realize yet that Mama's coming along for the ride, too.

From here Mama becomes an exercise in atmosphere that is eerie enough on its own, but also is prone to frequent jump scares and oh-my-God-what's-that-shadow-behind-her moments. It is also, alas, disrupted by periods of idiocy, the kind of stuff that feels more befitting a film of a lesser pedigree. Without getting too spoilery, Annabel's almost non-existent emotional reaction to certain mid-movie events strains believability, not to mention our sympathy for the character.

Then again, Annabel isn't necessarily designed to be likable. She's saddled with these kids, has to give up her "unconventional" life for them, and is pretty clearly not happy about it. See, Annabel is all about unwanted motherhood -- the first time we meet her, she's taking a home pregnancy test and celebrates the negative results. Meanwhile, Mama is doing everything she can, even from death, to take care of these children. Why should Annabel get Victoria and Lilly when Mama will give them everything she has to give? Which, admittedly, isn't all that much. As Roger Waters once said, "Mama's gonna make all of your nightmares come true."

Crafted from a freaky as all hell Spanish short film of the same name which caught del Toro's eye, Mama takes that premise and expands upon it with the short's director, Andres Muschietti, still at the helm. But whereas the Mama ghost in the short, with her jerky movements and not-of-this-earth coif, is pretty terrifying, the feature version can't help but take some of her edge away just by virtue of us seeing more of her. The obvious CGI aspects of the character design don't help.

Mama, don't fail me now!

Though funnily enough, while Mama loses some of her creep factor in this fleshing out -- if you will forgive the term -- she's also made more sympathetic as we learn of her back story and the reason she is driven from the afterlife to do what she does. Touches like these, as well as how Muschietti handles the kids in the film -- a child's vulnerability as she puts on her tiny glasses, which can turn to murky complicity when folks start falling victim to Mama -- mark him as a real talent in his feature debut.

It all builds to a crescendo of Mama vs. Mama that has the poetic beauty of the best of del Toro's films… which isn't to say that the ending necessarily makes sense. Still, it ends as Muschietti and del Toro want it to end, not how a Hollywood horror movie is "supposed to" end, and for that alone Mama gets points.