Movie Review: “Mama” Mild Maternal Scares

You know, sometimes you get points just for being better than expected, better than you had to be for the target audience. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it’s not. It’s actually praising with…faint praise.

“Mama” starts out with the news that a man (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has killed his wife and some co-workers. The man in question rushes home to pick up his two young daughters and takes off with them in the car. Barreling down a snowy mountain highway, the car spins out and goes over an embankment. Unharmed, the man wades into the snowy woods with his little girls in tow.

As they stumble into an abandoned cabin, the distraught father pulls out his gun, intending to finish the already grizzly day with a murder suicide. But just as he’s about to pull the trigger—something grabs him and takes him away. That something is “Mama” !

Cut to five years later, the girls are found in the cabin, crawling on all fours and with not much in the way of language skills. The girls’ uncle (also played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) gets custody in a “never in real life, only in the movies” kind of way. He and his punk rocker girlfriend (Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain from Zero Dark Thirty) attempt to raise the girls, though there is absolutely no evidence that they know anything about parenting.

“Mama” was produced by Guillermo Del Toro, who knows a thing or two about how to scare audiences, but he also knows how to put heart and humanity into his stories. “Mama” doesn’t live up to Del Toro’s work by a long shot, but I did like the way it carried traces of his DNA. We do come to care about almost every character on screen. It’s hard to be scared for someone if you don’t.

The film does pace back and forth over the same carpeting too many times. Yes, it does rely too much on “audio” scares, too. And the more we can actually see of this maternal ghost who doesn’t want the children to live with their uncle and his gf, the more kind of ridiculous she looks. They really should have gone the route of “less is more” when it comes to revealing the ghost/monster/alien of a scary movie.

And yet, you can’t deny that the film is somehow “classier” than most within its genre. The scares are mild to medium, no one gets sawed into bits or decapitated. The final act, a long time coming, is where Del Toro’s influence is most evident. Right down to the gentle blue lighting on the characters, as they witness Mama’s final act. And even though Jessica Chastain seems to be trying a little hard to put the edge into her “edgy” character, the acting among the cast is solid, and the production values are top notch.

So if you don’t like your scary movies too scary, you might find that “Mama” is a decent diversion for a couple hours. It’s worth 2 ½ stars our of 4.