Movie review: 'Mama,' you don’t scare me

What is wrong with "Mama"? When I broke down the pacing, suspense, and narrative extrapolation, they all passed muster. But they never gel together well either. Which is likely why it feels like "Mama" tries hard in the scare department; and if there's one thing that’s not frightening is a movie that tries too hard to be. 

 

The premise is executed well, as we start out with a tragedy in progress. It's the early years of the 2008 financial crisis and Jeffrey (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau of "Game of Thrones" fame) is on the brink of a meltdown. 

 

Daddy's gone 

 

On a snowy, winter day he kills his business partners and his wife. He whisks away his two young daughters (a 3-year-old Victoria and 1-year-old Lilly) and drives recklessly down a snow-covered highway. 

 

"Daddy, you're driving too fast!" exclaims the bespectacled Victoria, and sure enough the distressed daddy careens right off the road and into a tree down a steep valley. 

 

The three are alive but they're incredibly cold and in need of shelter—especially the toddler. But luck is with them when they find an abandoned cabin. Once inside we're made privy to Jeffrey's plans: he will kill his daughters and commit suicide. 

 

Talk about the ghost of a survivor's chance, this is where Mama comes in and derails Jeffrey's intention of familial destruction. Just after he takes off Victoria's glasses, and holds a gun up to her head, a shadowy figure pulls him out of the door and snaps his neck. 

 

We're carried through the next five years via the opening credits, in a time lapse of the children’s Crayola scrawls on the walls of the house.  

 

Lost girls, wild girls   

"Mama" is a Spanish-Canadian horror film co-written and directed by Andres Muschietti with Mexican dark fantasy icon Guillermo del Toro serving as executive producer. It expands on Muschietti's similarly-titled 2008 Spanish-language shortie, the outtakes of which you can see HERE.

 

Things get more interesting when the girls are found five years later by a rescue party hired by Lucas (the tragic Jeffrey's twin brother), who’s been at the search all those long years. 

 

The girls ARE alive but they've turned wild to survive. A welfare clinic assessment and psychiatric care follow, and soon the girls end up living with their Uncle Lucas and his punk bassist girlfriend Annabel ("Zero Dark Thirty's" Jessica Chastain).  

 

Two main themes are combined here to make a unique kind of haunting: the idea of the protective, yet vengeful ghost that is hundreds of years strong, and the world of the feral child. 

 

Both milieus provide ample enough depth of subject to power two movies, but they're never quite taken advantage of nor fully investigated. As a result there are head scratching WTF? moments that defy even the internal logic of a dark fantasy. 

 

Aside from the confusing, prickly segues in narrative, my biggest beef with Mama is: why does she wait for five damn years to claim the life of a child in place of the baby she lost in the early 1900s?    

 

"A ghost is an emotion bent out of shape," says a town archives employee in probably one of the weirdest wise woman caricature casting I’ve ever seen in a horror movie. 

 

It does help that "Mama" has the grit and charm of an actor of Chastain’s caliber. Plus, she carries all the vaguely Misfits-era raccoon make-up well.  

 

This is another Chastain spotlight performance and she acquits herself amazingly as a bohemian rocker turned surrogate mother, spectacularly unprepared for the care of kids—much less feral kids who come with a wraith as baggage. And not your garden variety poltergeist, neither. 

 

I say this because Coster-Waldau—in either of his roles—spends his time either dead (because you know, as the girls' father, Mama quickly dispatches him) or in a coma (now as the twin brother of said girls' daddy, Mama also finds a bone to pick with the poor man who just happens to look like the guy she retired five years back). Which is a shame because the guy CAN act (again, see "Game of Thrones").   

 

The super in supernatural

 

There are two things that are great about this movie. 

 

First are the young girls. More specifically in how they relate to the supernatural entity they refer to as Mama—and I do mean "super" because, boy, does she put Sadako and Freddy Krueger to shame with how she manifests in the physical world. 

 

Lily (Isabelle Nélisse) and older sister Victoria (Megan Charpentier) play tug-of-war with Mama, she feeds them cherries, she carries them around as she hovers and we see Lily's feet in the air as she giggles in delight. Perhaps the creepiest aspect is the way she sings to them.  

 

When they are discovered, they look like the classic feral children, more comfortable walking on all fours, unbathed, with bodies black and dirty, growling at the men who found them, quiet as hunters as they pad around with nary a sound, staring back with dispassionate animal eyes. It is also a joy to see them regain their humanity. 

 

Second is the very talented Javier Botet in the role of Mama. He also played the part of patient zero in the Spanish original of "REC" and "REC2" (his past works show versatility), and boy does his dextrous, slender body bring the mother of all bad mommy ghosts to unlife. 

 

I hope there wasn't much CGI done to enhance his already terrifying visage in full make-up and costume. 

 

Cheap is thy frights

 

The most disappointing thing about this move is the scares. To put it bluntly, they're cheap and of the shlock "gulatan" type. 

 

I have no beef per se with this school of horror filmmaking (some of the most enjoyable moments in my life have been spent with gore staples "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Nightmare on Elm St.") but with a director like Andres Muschietti getting top shelf help from someone like Guillermo Del Toro, you do expect the "surprise!" frights to at least provide deeper insight into the ecology of the supercharged ghost. 

 

I do like the moth metaphor but like so many things here, it goes nowhere.

 

Sure there are some genuine frights to be had (don't blink or you'll miss the part where Annabel mistakes an ambulatory pile of blankets for Lily) but they're too few and too much of a rip-off of previous other horror tropes (DSLR flashbulb for when the flashlight goes out, anyone? How about a crab-walking creature?) to save it or make it an exceptional horror film. 

 

This is a far cry from Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" or "The Devil's Backbone," and there's something distressingly nauseating in the way it tries to allude to them but fails. Like the Xerox of a parody. 

 

Oh sure, it's a thrill ride but you could pop in the Americanized versions of "The Ring" or "REC" and they’d still have more original jolts than the none too subtle "homages" found here. —KG, GMA News

 

"Mama" is currently screening in cinemas. 

 

Karl R. De Mesa is the author of "News of the Shaman" and "Damaged People: Tales of the Gothic-Punk."