Mama - Film Review

  TheBloodyCritique’s ‘Mama’ Film Review

Before directing the recent remake of Stephen King’s IT, Andy Muschietti first feature film was Mama released in 2013. Mama is a supernatural horror film about two little girls who, after tragically losing their parents, are missing for five years left in an abandoned cabin with a disturbing supernatural entity the girls refer to rather lovingly as ‘mama’. When the girls are finally found after five fucking years go by they’ve become wild and antisocial requiring therapy to be normal again! They’re taken in by their uncle and his band member girlfriend but Mama follows them and terrorises their new guardians.

I really liked IT, I loved the stuff with the kids and I enjoy Pennywise as a villain, the biggest problem with IT were the unnecessary jump scares, that problem is even more prominent here, every single ‘scary’ moment is accompanied by an annoyingly loud fucking clank sound effect, it’s cheap, it’s irritating and the more it occurred the more irritating it became, just because you can startle someone doesn’t make your film scary, if anything it’s the opposite! It’s as complex artistically as the old maze game thing kids would show you in school that ends with a picture of the exorcist and a loud scream to startle you, it’s like that about 35 times over a two hour period.  

It’s a shame because Mama has an interesting premise, I liked the idea of it, this scary supernatural demon whatever thing having a relationship with and being protective over these two little girls, it’s a good idea but the execution was underwhelming, the idea isn’t really explored in any depth beyond what you’d find in the synopsis and overall it felt generic but it was a solid okay, without the constant fucking shitty jump scares it would have been a solid good, it’s peppered with them though! The performances are all fine, nothing great but they’re all solidly fine, I wasn’t invested in any of the characters but they worked well enough.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is in this, he’s Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones, he plays the father of the two girls who dies in the first 5 minutes of the film and he also plays their uncle, there was no point in him playing both characters, no point at all! There’s one moment when the older sister sees him after five years in the cabin and thinks it’s her dad, obviously, but is corrected and it never comes up again! Pointless. The five years missing things as well is stupid, they were in a cabin not too far from the main road and it didn’t seem like they were being held captive, why no one found them is beyond me!

All in all Mama is just another generic horror movie that doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, it’s a bit underwhelming, it’s terrible though like I say, it’s a solid okay, would I recommend it, nah, there’s not enough of a good reason to, maybe horror fans, people who love ‘scary’ movies, it’s one of them, I’m immune to being scared by films at this point but there’s some creepy visuals and spooky imagery, there’s not much more than that though so to everyone else I’d say don’t bother, it’s fairly unsatisfying, I’m gonna give Mama 5.9/10.

What did you think of Mama?