Mama

Jessica Chastain as a punk rocker with tattoos, dark hair, and tight Misfits t shirts??? Who cares if there’s an actual story to accompany this! It’s like someone in Hollywood is living out my fantasy of turning hot actresses into whatever you want! Just look at what they did with Jennifer Aniston in Horrible Bosses; they turned her into the super dirty girl that we all hoped she could be.  All you have to do is wait until they’re old and desperate enough to keep getting attention and next thing you know they’re holding bananas next to their mouth and dropping it like it’s hot! I’d talk about how this also applies in real life but I do actually want to get a date in the next 6 years so I’ll just move on. 

The studios kept hyping this movie up as a Guillermo del Toro production, and while it is produced by him and has his fingerprints all over it, the movie is actually directed and partially written by Andres’ Muschietti ; who directed and wrote the short version of Mama in 2008. The story is about two young girls who are abandoned in a cabin in the woods after a horrible incident involving wealthy people. They never tell you their ages but they appear to be around the age of 4 and less than 12 months old at the time. The story then shifts to 5 years later where the girls’ uncle played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau aka Game of Thrones ‘ Jaime Lannister (as a matter of fact I’m just going to refer to him as Lannister from here on out) has exhausted whatever money he inherited from his brother trying to find them. His punk rock girlfriend (Chastain) is trying to be supportive but she’s also in a band, likes to party, and feels that in no way she’s ready to have kids. 

Well one day the girls are finally found but as you can imagine, growing up in the woods with no human to raise them had some pretty damaging effects to not only their cognitive development but to their social development as well. They basically moved around on all fours like animals and communicated only in grunts and screeching growls. The young couple struggles to get them acclimated to normal life but what impedes their progress the most comes in the form of the ghost that raised them for those 5 years; a shadowy figure that the girls refer to as Mama. Mama has seemingly followed them to their new home and is not quite ready to give them up. 

As Mama wreaks havoc you see Chastain slowly growing into this mother role as her natural instincts kick in and she tries to not only form a relationship with the girls but also protect them from what she perceives to be a threat to them. For the most part her portrayal of the rocker girlfriend is a pretty decent one with the only funny moment coming when apparently Mama was not a fan of her bass guitar skills. One night while practicing a song, Mama goes ape shit and nearly kills everyone in the house. But for some reason I was he only one in the theater who was laughing. Lannister is barely in the movie and is basically there to look pretty; which is good because he actually turns in an awful performance. 

The best part of this movie is that del Toro only produces it. Just like in The Devil’s Backbone, he has this knack for introducing a scary figure or ghost and creating a genuine fear of it but then he basically humanizes it as the film goes on and you start to identify with the antagonist. So the entire tone of the film completely  changes and it essentially becomes Edward Scissorhands. The same happens here for the most part but not until the final 10 minutes of the film when Muschietti finally allows you to see the ghost in it’s full form. Overall Mama doesn’t look too bad but she does look like the librarian ghost from Ghostbusters 1. “Get her Ray!!!” Up until that point, he did an excellent job of using shadows, light, and clever camera angles to make Mama as creepy as possible, otherwise this movie basically would have been The Grudge 3. Also the way the younger kid continued to move as an animal at times and crept around in the darkness added yet another disturbing element to the film. I am never having kids for fear that one of them will be perched on the dresser in the corner like a raccoon while I'm trying to have sex with it's mother!

As far as horror movies go, this one is pretty entertaining and I rate it as FRESH! Next I think I will take my Chastain as a blond stripper, thanks!