Mama

3 Stars (out of four)

So, Guilermo del Toro has done it again.  Even though he is the producer for this film, he nevertheless keeps finding creepy and scary subjects.  Mama is the story about two little girls with a very strange guardian.  The movie starts when they, Victoria and Lily, are 3 and 1 years old, respectively.  After their father becomes unhinged and kills his business partners and wife, he kidnaps his girls and runs away during a snow storm.  The car they are in crashes off an icy mountain road, and he and his girls limp away and find a deserted cabin.  Inside, he almost kills his daughters before something grabs him and kills him.  Five years later, the girls are found in the cabin still alive, but almost feral.  They are taken in by their artist uncle and his rocker girlfriend Annabelle (Jessica Chastaine, before her Oscar-nominated turn in Zero Dark Thirty.)  But it seems an unwanted guest came with them, a malevolent ghost the girls call Mama who had taken care of them in the cabin and is not happy the couple has taken Victoria and Lily into their home.  Mama apparently gets jealous, and reacts violently when people take what she has claimed as hers.

Mama is creepy and dark, but unfortunately can't stand among better horror films.  It's too bad, too, because it is actually probes interesting subject matter.  With the feral girls adjusting back into society, it's all compelling.  It also doesn't hurt that Jessica Chastaine can actually act, which raises this film above its lesser contemporaries.  Unfortunately, while her role is well-played, I can't really care about her.  She is a twenty-something tatooed rebel who plays in a rock band.  The uncle, competently played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister from HBO's amazing series Game of Thrones), is actually the one with the greater motivation to help the girls (they are his nieces, after all, and he truly loves them) but he is relegated to a back story.  I think his story may have extensively suffered in post-production editing, because he doesn't really do anything.  Annabelle is thrust into the role of the girls' guardian after Mama attacks the uncle and puts him in the hospital, a role which she doesn't really want and actually resents a bit.  But she does it for her man.  The problem is the story is clumsily written.  I don't see a believable evolution of the relationship between Annabelle and the girls.  They understandably don't trust each other to begin, but we don't see a gradual change in the relationship.  It just abruptly changes because the script says so.  This is where the movie could have excelled.  The writers were obviously trying to do something.  This change in the trust in their relationship could have had so much outstanding drama, but it is ultimately fumbled in their hands.  

Also, I don't see a lot of chemistry between Chastaine and Coster-Waldau.  They don't act like a couple head over heels in love, or at least it doesn't come across that way.  So Annabelle's desire to help her man's nieces despite the fact she resents doing it is unbelievable, or at least stretches credibility.  There is also another discarded subplot where the girls' aunt wants to take them away because she doesn't like her brother and Annabelle's lifestyle.  But she just comes across as bitchy, with no real desire to help the girls, or even any indication she may love them. It feels like it's there simply because movies with orphans being taken in has to have a mean, other party who wants to take them away from the loving protagonists.  Unfortunately, this also could have been another good subplot, but just feels shoehorned in for no particular reason.  

The movie is genuinely creepy, as most Boo! films are, but the PG-13 rating keeps it away from any truly horrifying aspects, which again, makes the movie fall short of greatness.  That is a bit frustrating because it could have been great.  I'll repeat it again here.  Why does Hollywood feel the need to make watered-down, family sorta-acceptable PG-13 horror flicks?  A horror movie is not exactly a family outing, so Hollywood, PLEASE for the love of God, STOP trying to make them as such.  Concentrate instead on real scares, and you just might reap some real rewards (Silence of the Lambs and Se7en, anyone?)