Review of Mama (2013) by Mordiggian — 18 Mar 2013

Before I get started, let me say that this movie had good qualities. The acting was, for the most part, well done, even by the children. The beginning of the movie had me excited; the back story of the girls was interesting and I felt that the pictures in the opening credits and Lucas' search for the girls were a good start for making characters the audience could care about.

Before we kept seeing Mama (or the Skinny Woman, as I think the credits called her), the hints at her were nice. I really liked when she first played with Lilly. The suspense, despite a bad plot and pay off, was good.

But, there were also lots of problems. The characterization quickly went nowhere and any development felt forced. The color editing was dumb, utterly failing to create atmosphere and making sure that the audience couldn't be a part of the story.

The story, while a bit used, could have been salvageable with a better ending, but with the way it is, there is no feeling of conclusion. So Lilly, Gene, and Dreyfus are dead, how do you explain that to the police? Does Victoria overcome the psychological scarring that all of her childhood has clearly been? Once the excitement dies down, are Lucas and Annabelle, with no previous experience and now, presumably, without the house, able to properly care for Victoria, assuming that she wasn't taken away after the bodies are found? Also, while Mama's design was certainly one of the better parts of the movie, I don't understand the choice to show so much of her (and then, since so much was shown, why include the overdone flashes-of-light-in-a-dark-room bit?) It provided a few jump scares at first, but the CGI was distracting.

Everything else in the movie, the moths, the leaves and vines, the dirt, the cabin, the feral girls, and the design of Mama itself, was natural, so having something as unnatural as the clearly CGIed ghost was jarring, and not in the good horror way.

And, combined with knowing everything about Mama, there was nothing left to the imagination, robbing the movie of a lot of potential horror and creepiness. Yes, it might have scared you at the time, but I doubt anyone will be having any nightmares about her, and if not for the bad parts, this alone would have made the movie completely forgettable.

Well, maybe I would have remembered it, if only for how hard I tried to figure out the "meaning" of the themes and symbols. There were moths as a sign of Mama, moths that Lilly ate, the cocoon that Mama formed around herself and Lilly, and the blue moths that were Lilly? I know that they usually do mean death and rebirth and all that jazz, but what does that have to do with Mama? Didn't we already learn that ghosts were simply emotions? Are moths compulsive, "motherly", or desperate like the ghost? (For that matter, what emotion was Mama?) What do the cherries mean? The previously mentioned focus on nature? The long limbs and weird walk of Mama? If they don't have a meaning then why are they there? And, now for a weird (mostly joking) observation.

Was... Was Dr. Dreyfus' secretary wearing the three wolf moon shirt? No, I'm being serious. Because that messed me up for the rest of the movie. I was in a whole internet mood and everything was weird.

Mama was the Bongcheon-Dong Ghost looking for her baby or (before we saw her face) the female Slenderman ("skinny woman", remember?) kidnapping children. Jeff was an inverted Jeff the Killer: he was in all black against a light background and wanted Lucas to wake up.

The pictures Annabelle found felt like something you'd see as the image on a page of the Creepypasta Wiki and honestly, the concept felt like it would feel in place there. In the end, this isn't the worst movie I've seen in a while and I can say I was more surprised that it had good parts than that it had bad.