Review of Mama (2013) by Gregeporter — 30 Aug 2015

Bottom line: Pretty average horror movie: story is bland and odd technical decisions minimize the scariness.

Discussing horror movies makes me a little uneasy. How much can I reveal about the plot before I give away too much? Let me use the trailer as a baseline.

When the market crashed, a businessman killed his partners and estranged wife before running into the woods with his two children. The man's brother, Lucas (Coster-Waldau), an artist, has spent nearly all of his money looking for the brother and children. His bass-guitar playing girlfriend, Annabel (Chastain), doesn't really care about them nor does she want children. Upon discovery of the two, Annabel must battle the supernatural while adjusting to the new lifestyle of a...mama. After being lost for five years, who...or what...could have been taking care of the two children?

After watching Drag Me to Hell and Dream Home and reading them from an economic perspective, my initial inclination was to read Mama that way too. We have a bunch of economic concerns from the onset: the volatility of the market causes this horror, Lucas is spending all of his money searching for the children, on the meager salaries of being in a rock band and "drawing pictures" how could the two afford children, etc. But, this type of reading wouldn't really be fun for you if you haven't seen it too plus I would have to be worried about spoilers. Instead, let's look at some of the film's interesting mechanical choices. I am normally terrible with scary movies; even if they aren't scary, I imagine how they could've been scary. Mama, fortunately, was so not scary that I was OK and it makes me wonder why.

The first problem is that the monster is revealed too soon. For me, it isn't about the monster itself as much as the anticipation. I won’t describe the monster to you but you can see it in the trailer.

The second problem was an odd sense of timing with the sound effects. It always seemed like the sounds were a fraction of a second too soon or too late to get the effect across. I think I will devote a blog post about it soon. It is obvious that a jump scare isn’t just the music and it isn’t just the visuals but a combination of the two. If either sense is off, the effect will be compromised.

Without describing the ending, I will say that it is sad. I wasn’t surprised or shocked and it fits in well with an economic reading but it still didn’t make me feel good.

I was pleasantly surprised by Megan Charpentier’s performance of Victoria, the older of the two children. She isn’t loud or obnoxious or precocious. Go her. The other little girl is fine; she is too young to talk so she just crawls about.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend Mama. It doesn’t provide anything new or fun. It is, at best, mildly creepy and mildly thrilling. I suppose thrilling cannot, by the nature of the word ‘thrilling’, be mild so I just stick to mildly creepy. The acting and cinematography are all fine but, again, there isn't anything notable. If Mama was on your list of movies to see, you could do worse but if it wasn’t don’t feel the need to see it.