Yet another film that everyone raved about like it was the second coming of horror when it first came out; yet another film that I promptly decided to ignore in favour of less "popular" or well-known films. Most of which turned out to be painful to watch, so now I slink back to the lauded films to see if all the hype really was justified. In this case it's Mama, produced by Guillermo Del Toro and directed by Andy/ Andrés Muschietti.
Victoria and Lilly are taken by their father to a cabin in the middle of nowhere after he snaps and shoots up his workplace and his wife. He plans to kill his children as well before committing suicide, but is stopped by a mysterious shadowy figure who kills him (via twisting his body almost like a balloon animal) and then starts to take care of the two toddlers, albeit apparently from the shadows. Five years later the girls' uncle Lucas is still searching for his brother and nieces, paying for a search party to keep looking for them in the wooded areas they disappeared in. The searchers find the cabin and the girls, who are now 8 and 6 respectively, but they are almost completely feral. It takes three months of therapy before the girls are considered even halfway "cured", at which point Lucas and his fiancee Annabel become the girls' legal guardians, living in a house supplied by the psychologist studying their case. The psychologist is particularly interested in "Mama" - an "imaginary friend" he believes the girls created to cope with their isolation. It turns out, however, that "Mama" is far from imaginary, and she is angry that people have come to take her children away from her...
Confession time: Until I checked the IMDB page in preparation for this review, I had completely missed the fact that Lucas/Jeffrey was played by the same actor who plays Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones. It's the lack of fair hair and the inclusion of some heavy stubble that does it; he looks completely different (at least to me, at any rate, but we're also still only at the second season in this house).
Confessions about my lack of pop culture awareness in certain areas aside, Mama is a very atmospheric and emotional ghost story. The story that unfolds of Mama's origins and what happened to her to turn her into the shadowy guardian-figure to Victoria and Lilly is incredibly tragic and by the end of the film it's still hard not to emphasize with her at least a little bit - maybe even more than Annabel, who is clearly meant to be the "replacement" maternal figure in the girls' life and the biggest "threat" to Mama, but for the first half or two-thirds of the film is at best disinterested in the girls and at worst actively resentful of them.
Let's talk about Annabel for a moment. She's the bass player in a rock band, engaged to an artist and is therefore so hipster it almost physically hurts. When we first meet her in the film, she's rejoicing over the fact that she's not pregnant, so we also know that she really doesn't want children in her life - at least not at that point. The film is obviously setting up the inevitable conflict of her needing to adapt to the two girls - but the problem is that the whole thing is a little too stereotypical for my liking. The Annabel of the first half of the film seemed to me to be the kind of person who would unironically refer to children as "crotchdroppings"; meanwhile you can pinpoint the exact moment Annabel's "maternal instincts" kick in as it's the moment she stops wearing her hip band t-shirts and starts wearing a sensible polo neck sweater instead. All in all it makes her a far less sympathetic character to root for in the film - for all her faults (not the least of which is being dead), at least Mama loves the girls, plays with them and wants to take care of them no matter what, while Annabel has to take a long time coming to an "epithany" over them.
You might also note that I've not described Mama as a scary film. Honestly, I don't think it is. It's got some jump scares, sure, but it's much more of a tragic tale than anything else. I wasn't on edge at any point during the film; I wasn't afraid for any of the protagonists (except for the family dog, but he survived unharmed). I'd describe it as a supernatural tragedy of almost Shakespearean levels, certainly, but not really as a horror film. That's not to say that it's a bad film, not by any means - just that it wasn't exactly what it was advertised to be for me.
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