Review of Mama (2013) by Nesbitt10 — 03 May 2013

"Mama" succeeds in generating a few genuine scares, but it predominantly provides some lingering, and creepy images--despite indulging into numerous clichés. It is a well-made film that delivers mild chills and thrills, with a solid cast to help gloss over the expected bag of tricks. It also helps tremendously to have Guillermo del Toro as an Executive Producer.

In the prologue to "Mama," we learn of a shooting at a financial firm after an economic crash. A distraught executive named Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) arrives home, quickly collects his two young daughters, Victoria and Lilly, and speeds off. They end up in an abandoned house deep in the forest, where Lucas apparently intends to shoot his daughters before he can kill himself. But that is not quite how it works out. Five years later, Lucas' brother Jeffrey (also played by Coster-Waldau) has never given up hope. Jeff's team of searchers comes across the abandoned house we saw a century ago in a nightmare. Dad's long gone, but the girls are still there crawling around on all fours and making noises like wild animals. How could they have survived on their own? They are taken into the care of their dead father's brother and his rocker girlfriend away from the cabin they've called home all this time. Mama is none too pleased about this development, as I'm sure you can imagine. The girls are kept in isolation for a few months as Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash) records their every move while helping with their assimilation, given that Victoria keeps making cryptic references to an unseen Mama. Lilly sleeps under the bed, still occasionally eats bugs, and screams whenever anyone tries to touch her. The girls hardly seem ready for ice cream and bedtime stories, but Jeffrey is determined to give them a normal life. Muschietti and his story collaborators Neil Cross and Barbara Muschietti, managed to keep an entire back-story up their sleeves to reveal it in teasing fashion, which works to a degree, maintaining viewers engagement with the film. In addition, there are some creative nightmare sequences--a highly stylized dream set in which we see a crazed young woman screaming bloody terror before leaping off a cliff with her newborn.

Overall, the casting for the film is fine, especially the role of Annabel, played by Jessica Chastain, who slowly sheds her tough-talking exterior from "Zero Dark Thirty" (2012). Her nurturing instincts take over in this film, displaying her incredible range as one of the finest at her craft at this time. There are ideas and themes present in "Mama", but they are not quite fully developed to satisfaction, as the film does confuse at times when it seems to suggest that the idea of settling into a normal family unit could in fact be the real horror. Come the end, Muschietti may not have worked out all his own unresolved issues, but he does manage communicate his fears effectively. And besides, that's what sequels are for.