Movie Review: Mama
Guillermo del Toro is synonymous with quality macabre filmmaking. So it’s no surprise that with del Toro as executive producer, Mama gives us a ghost story that is not only very chilling, but also has some heart to it. Too often do we see simple slasher films in which the characters spend the whole film running around, just trying to escape a monster/ghost/psycho killer. But in Mama we get something seldom seen in horror films: actual character development. This mainly comes courtesy of our main character Annabel (Jessica Chastain).
Although at the age in life where most women have started a family and/or a serious career, Annabel is still still enjoying a life mostly lacking in responsibility. With dyed black hair and a gig playing bass in a punk rock band, she clearly prefers the alternative lifestyle to the conventional. When we first meet her she is celebrating a pregnancy test that has come out negative, ecstatic at the fact that she can continue to lead her carefree lifestyle. But her ecstasy doesn’t last long.
Annabel’s boyfriend Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has been bleeding his savings dry looking for his brother and two young nieces ever since they went missing 5 years ago. When the girls, Victoria and Lilly, are finally found in a cabin in the woods they are feral and animalistic. Barely recognizable as human children at first, they are kept in psychiatric care for some time and eventually released into the custody of Lucas and Annabel in hopes that a loving environment will help ease them back into society. However this change is much to the displeasure of Annabel. “They’re already fucked up,” she complains. “I didn’t even get a chance to fuck them up. They came that way.” This leads us to believe Annabel’s unwillingness to have children stemmed not from the freedom she would lose, but from a lack of confidence in her own ability to properly care for another life.
But the question still remains: Since there was no sign of their father upon discovery, how did two little girls girls survive in the wilderness on their own for so long? It is made clear to us as the viewers that this is possible because of a being the girls call Mama. And it is also clear to us that Mama has followed the girls back into the world. We see Victoria and Lilly constantly staring at and lovingly interacting with a menacing presence just offscreen. As the film goes on we get closer and closer glimpses at Mama, each more eerie and frightening than the last.
When the girls are brought back into society, the elder sister, Victoria (Megan Charpentier), is given a pair of glasses to correct her vision. Seeing familiar things she used to know with clarity, she is able to distance herself from the cloudy and obscure world she spent the past five years in and grow closer to Annabel. But her sister Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse), who was only an infant when left in the woods and has never known anything but the woods and the love of Mama, has more trouble readjusting and remains wary of Annabel. The ability of these actresses to portray the development from a completely animalistic nature to Victoria’s loving yet fearful personality and Lilly’s cautious and defiant one is very impressive considering how young they are for such roles.
And just as the girls develop different emotions towards their new surrogate mother, Annabel slowly and begrudgingly learns to accept her new role as a caretaker. Maybe she has what it takes to be a mother after all. But Annabel is tested beyond what she imagined when Mama starts getting jealous.
Just like in any ghost story, details concerning who and what Mama is are slowly unearthed. In this aspect, Mama is undeniably a bit cliché. Whether through nightmares and premonitions, unexplained visions and messages from the dead, or the obligatory superstitious public records worker with all the right information, different characters retrieve individual pieces of the puzzle on their own, but no one ever has enough of the whole story to know exactly what’s going on. And no matter what time of day someone leaves to go investigate Mama’s cabin, they somehow always seem to arrive right around midnight.
But even though Mama is built with some of the classic horror storytelling tropes, they aren’t just thrown together, but are handled with finesse and built upon a foundation of characters that grow and change as a result of their predicaments. Like with some of del Toro’s other projects, we’re given something we’re familiar with that’s raised to another level and has some unexpected twists along the way. The fact that we expect certain things to happen plays to the film’s advantage, upping the anticipation and sense of foreboding that’s present in nearly every scene.
Definitely one of the scarier ghosts in recent memory, the most frightening aspect of Mama is that she is always just out of sight, revealing herself only to the wild children who aren’t scared of her only because they can’t comprehend what she is in the way that we can. For a majority of the film we only see shadows or catch glimpses of the eerie way she moves and hovers. And the unnerving feeling of her presence follows us out of the theatre, causing every small movement we see out of the corner of our eye make us think of her.
Grade: B
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