Mama
★★
(2012)
It's not hard to see why Guillermo Del Toro hand-picked Argentine Andrés Muschietti to flesh out his 3 minute short film Mama into a gothic suburban horror feature. Loaded with scares and atmosphere but sadly unravelling into a bit of a mess in the film's second half, it falls victim to many clichés rampant in recent "big dark house" horror. Del Toro's own hand maybe to blame for the disintegration of Mama into a pastiche of Tim Burton's black and blue palette and the Spanish chiller par excellence of The Orphanage but there is only just enough here, mainly an interesting performance from Jessica Chastain, to make it worth a look.
It's a unsettling film from the lengthy intro which sees a father on a rampage in the midst of the financial crisis, knock off some co workers and his wife. We're told all this through radio chatter and news reports as the man flees to a cabin in the snowy woods with his two young daughters who are saved from his wrath by the titular "Mama". 5 years later the girl's uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has tracked the girls down. Obviously the pair are a little out of sorts, as you would be being raised by a supernatural being but the caring brother and his rock star girlfriend Annabel (Chastain) take the girls on and no sooner can you say "dead woman living in the cupboard" things start to get a little weird.
Mama, shot well and acted beyond reason and the script by its leads, but the atmosphere fizzles and it never quite lives up to the horror promised in the infancy of the film. The girls (Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse) are coached brilliantly and put in some great work but there is little effective psychological horror here and the thing gets bogged down in quick scares and flickering lights. A camera flash sequence (taken directly from Silent House and its remake) seems lost in the hyper tension of constant gloom, Coster-Waldau is unceremoniously removed from much of the film to allow Chastain to run the show and soon enough the film disappears into an obvious maternal realisation for Annabel and a climax with little to offer bar the promise of a sequel.
Muschietti's film, doesn't quite stand up even to James Wan's Insidious (a film to which it bares some resemblance and a lot of shared influence) and doesn't even hold a candle to Scott Dericksons supremely under rated Sinister (with a fantastic performance from Ethan Hawke) but fans of Del Toro and of the new wave of horror España will find much to like. For the rest of us the CGI ghost and knife edge soundtrack just aren't enough to linger in the memory and Mama becomes another missed overblown opportunity at making horror a genre to be respected once more. It's obvious that Muschietti has talent but that may not become clear until he comes out from under the watchful eye of his visionary producer.
