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Mama: Acts I and II are Breathtaking

By Jim Rohner · January 22, 2013

It's only January and Mama has already set the bar high for mainstream horror films to follow in 2013.  Like an abusive relationship, studios continue to take advantage of our devotion to movies by abusing us with abysmal genre offerings in January and we continue to endorse it.  One need look no further than the incongruity between the quality and the box office of titles like Texas Chainsaw 3D or The Devil Inside as prime examples of this perpetual cycle of give and take.

So much expected are January's table scraps that it's worth broadcasting far and wide when a film like Mama comes along to validate our trust in its potential, a potential that, despite 2011's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark hiccup, still carries weight due to the attachment of Guillermo del Toro as executive producer.

As EP, del Toro has shown a fondness for fostering directors whose stories feature children as the focus of super- or unnatural machinations, so it seems only natural that he gravitated toward Andres Muschietti's 3-minute short film about two young girls trying to escape from "Mama," an eery female specter with unnatural, jittery movements popularized by J-horror films like The Ring.  The short is duplicated almost exactly in the feature length as just one of many terrifying sequences, but the deja vu makes the sequence no less frightening and it's perfectly indicative of the mood and execution that makes Mama such an effective film.

In the feature length expounding, the two young girls, Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nelisse), are found living in a feral state after being abandoned by their father, wanted for the murder of his business partners and estranged wife, 5 years earlier.  Having lived seemingly alone for so long has left the girls distrustful and fearful of people and while Victoria—3-years old at the time her father drove her and her sister out into the woods – maintains the ability to communicate verbally, Lilly, having been raised almost entirely in the wild, maintains more animalistic qualities, scuttling around on all fours and messily eating anything she finds on the floor.  Once brought back to civilization, Victoria seems more apt for a return to normalcy, but just like her sister, she too is frequently observed staring at a wall and silently chatting to an invisible friend named "Mama."

The girls' Uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), who never gave up trying to find his nieces, wants to take them in, but his status as an underpaid artist living in a studio apartment doesn't make him an ideal candidate to support the children.  Still, Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kish), the childcare professional who has observed the girls since their return, believes Lucas to be a more loving and supporting surrogate parent for the girls than their Aunt Jean (Jane Moffat) and raises a proposition: if the doctor can regularly come by to observe and study the girls, Lucas and his rock bassist girlfriend, Annabel (Jessica Chastain), can move into a house fully paid for by the institution.

It's not long after the move that strange things start to happen.  The girls, already tight-lipped around their adopted parents, begin drawing pictures of a strange family all over their walls and can be heard late at night singing to (and with?) their invisible friend.  After an unfortunate and unexplained tragedy finds Lucas in the hospital, Annabel, already an unwilling mother to Victoria and "the other one," finds herself thrust into the role of the even more reluctant single parent.  While Annabel attempts to be a somewhat competent parent to the girls, Dr. Dreyfuss begins digging into Victoria's hypnotherapy story about a "sad lady" who lost her daughter long ago.  As Lucas slowly recovers in the hospital, the bumps in the night back at home become louder and more frequent.

Perhaps bumps in the night isn't an appropriate phrase to use, as the implied cheap technique of sound effects in the darkness is a trick to which Mama never stoops in order to frighten.  Too many horror films build the promise of fright through false scares—a house pet jumping out of nowhere, a family member abruptly appearing right behind someone—manufacturing tension through absence rather than through mood and construction.  Muschietti instead borrows heavily from directing techniques of J-horror, most prominently and successfully the habit of putting the ghostly figure in plain sight and letting tension arise organically from the moments where we hold our breath waiting for something to happen.  If Muschietti moves the camera or cues a change in the score, he's doing so as a promise that something scary is about to happen and he ALWAYS comes through on that promise.  Knowing that nothing cheap is waiting around the corner leads to a viewing experience that is uneasy and unnerving as horror films should be, never allowing us to feel safe or settled.

Unlike Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, the last horror film that del Toro executive produced, Mama succeeds because it balances the innocence of the children at its center with the maturity of its adults.  Just as important to both the audience and the narrative is the development of Annabel, whose evolution from selfish, unwilling parent to selfless, caring mother may be predictable, but is no less touching because of the reality Chastain brings to her character and because of the danger looming over every character involved, including Victoria and Lily.  Even though the sisters are still borderline feral when they arrive at the home of Annabel and Lucas, the pre-credit backstory detailing their abandoning lends an innocence and vulnerability to them that is carried through until the film's ending.

Were I to pick a major flaw with Mama it would be the aforementioned unending, which seems to borrow a page from the Drag Me to Hellbook of emotionally unfair and unfulfilling conclusions.  In fact, the entire third act lead up to the film's conclusion feels incongruous to the tone of the two-thirds that came before it, almost as though it borrowed a climax from a different film.  While Mama largely succeeds with its scares, it lacks a bit in its narrative, relying on a few cheap instances of out of the blue dream sequences that are far too convenient and sporadic in how much and when they reveal necessary exposition to the leads.

Still, Mama had built up enough good will by the time Act III rolls around that it doesn't nullify what has come before and even with its problems, this is still an impressive horror film in how it promises scares and delivers them.  Hopefully this is indicative of things to come from Muschietti.