I can’t remember the last time I went to the movie theater three times in a week. Three times in a month, even. My friend Danel Olson, editor of the Exotic Gothic series, asked me if I wanted to see Mama, about which I’d heard little other than generally favorable reviews, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
It might surprise you to learn that I’m not a particularly big fan of horror movies. I went through a phase in university where we watched every horror movie we could get our hands on (VHS was brand new, so suddenly you could see things when you wanted to), but over the past decade or two, my horror intake has been limited. I’m no big fan of the gross-out. The Walking Dead is about as far as I go in that direction these days.
I have to say that I was impressed by Mama. There wasn’t much grossness, and very few gratuitous scares. The tone was chilling and disturbing, and they did allow the monster to leap at the screen a few times, but mostly it was about a building sense of dread. Jessica Chastain (The Help) was in Joan Jett mode, with short black hair, tattooed arms and a rock-and-roll attitude. She plays a young musician who has no intention of having kids who finds herself in charge of two disturbed children. Her boyfriend’s brother went off the deep end and killed a few people. He also intended to kill his kids after he ran off the road and ended up in a cabin in the woods, but that didn’t work out so well for him. His daughters (1 and 3 at the time) spend the next five years in that cabin before their uncle’s search team finds them. They are feral, but resilient, especially the older girl. A psychologist puts this “family” in a nice house so he can observe the girls’ recovery.
I am in awe of the two little (Canadian) girls in this film. They are very young and the film demands a lot of them. They are focused and unaffected. It was a brave endeavor to build a film around such juvenile characters, and it could have been a disaster if the kids had been self-conscious or simply bad at conveying what was asked of them. They seemed so genuine, even when what they were asked to do was unusual. The creepiest part of the film was the way the kids scuttered around like animals after they were found.
At times, the mood and tone of the film reminded me of The Shining. Later it started to make me think of Bag of Bones. One horror trope they adhered to was that, no matter what time of day someone set out to find the cabin in the woods, it was always dark when they got there. The monster (a ghost, in a sense, but a different interpretation of what ghosts are) stays in the shadows for a long time. When it finally appears, it’s decently done, though it loses some of its impact. I thought I knew where they were headed in terms of an ending, and they did get there, but then they went further, with a rather surprising development beyond that. I’m not entirely happy with the staging of the finale, but on the whole I thought the film was very well done. There’s a character who gets a comeuppance that no one in the audience minded, which only says to me that the character was drawn too one-dimensionally. We all were rooting for this character’s violent demise. A tad too easy. The dream sequences were fascinating.
Danel teaches English at the college where there was a school shooting a couple of weeks ago. We talked about how tender emotions still were after the event. Though the campus is in what might be termed a “bad neighborhood,” and people have been robbed at the bus stop near the campus, this is the first time a gun was fired on the campus and it stole the sense that it was a safe haven. He told me about one student who was in the bathroom when the shooting took place. The student exited the bathroom to find the halls empty, then returned to the classroom and it was empty, too, along with the adjacent ones. Very Twilight Zone.
