Mama--Not A Nurturing Film

The movie feels like it's forever too

                The 2013 movie Mama features one of my new favorite actresses, Jessica Chastain, and the worst plot of the New Year. You probably recognize Chastain from Zero Dark Thirty where she was torturing terrorists. She learned everything about torture, I assume, from the producers of Mama.

                The film begins with a man shooting his wife and fleeing into a snowstorm with his two young daughters, Victoria and Lilly. He wrecks his car and takes shelter in an abandoned, though convenient, cabin. When he tries to kill his daughters, placing a gun against Victoria’s head, a mysterious force snaps his neck and drags his body out into the snow. The girls then live off cherries. Just cherries. Cherries that fall out of the sky like they’re in Pac-Man. Several years pass.

                The girls are eventually discovered and adopted by their uncle and his girlfriend, Jessica Chastain. This Chastain has not been nominated for an Academy Award nor killed Osama Bin Laden yet, she is just a punk rocker who is introduced by peeing on an EPT and celebrating its negative result. So she is thrilled when her boyfriend adopts two feral children who refuse to sleep in a bed and can’t speak English (not). Luckily, Chastain’s boyfriend, Victoria and Lilly’s uncle, is injured mysteriously and put into a coma within fifteen minutes of the film (because it’s not his name on the movie poster).

                So Chastain is stuck with these two demon girls who insist there is an invisible being feeding them cherries and living in their closet—Mama. And of course, their psychiatrist doesn’t believe them (because in every horror film EVER there is a doctor who insists there is nothing supernatural happening, and an artist, like musician Chastain, who insists there is, in fact, a “presence”).

                So the audience suffers through the “Look out behind you!” while the characters dumbly insist there is nothing irrational about giant black vortexes appearing in the walls and little girls playing hide and seek with the thing in their closet while barely escaping their own horrible deaths with every scene. This lasts for an hour.

                SPOILER TIME. The movie ends like this: the psychiatrist in denial dies, the girls’ Aunt Jean dies, and Lilly dies. Turns out Mama was an asylum patient who jumped off a cliff with a baby in her arms and is now spending her days of the afterlife searching for her child (which makes her not so bright, because insane or not, if you jump off a cliff with an infant, it’s not going to survive the fall).

                Lilly, the younger child, ends up jumping off the cliff with her imaginary friend Mama and Chastain holds onto Victoria (who was always her favorite anyway) and watches her go. Because in the end, what the audience needs to remember is, Chastain hates kids.

                This movie had a contrived plot and lot of bad acting, but ultimately is not the worst horror film I’ve ever seen. I suppose it even offered some fresh actual Gothic elements instead of cheap gore and startling “jump-out” scenes meant to hook the common modern audience. I appreciated it holding to the female importance of a horror film—the idea that Chastain needed to find her sphere of domesticity. She is seen doing laundry instead of having her own career in her (probably mediocre) rock band. So it’s nice to see the movie teaching us a woman’s role is as mother and housewife like it’s an episode of Mad Men.

                The movie was reminiscent of a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story—you have crazy women, babies, the woman’s role, and women dying; key elements in any one of her pieces. And as she is major influence to haunted literature, I suppose Mama did a few things right (if this were the 20s).

                Ultimately the ending left me feeling unsatisfied, like it could have been better, but they ran out of time and slapped on a conclusion. And in the end, we're still all wondering "What with the frickin' moths?" This film is not recommended.

 Is it wrong I spent most of the movie laughing at the girls crawling all over the floor like feral lizards?