Mama has the most terrifying cold opening of the year

Rating: 7/10 (24 September 2013)

The senior partner of an investment brokerage Jeffrey (Nikolaj Coaster-Waldau) has a breakdown and kills his two associates and his wife. Then he takes his three-year old daughter Victoria and the one-year old daughter Lilly and drives his car through a winding snowing road. He has a car accident and fall off a cliff, but he brings his daughters to an abandoned and isolated cabin to kill them, but the children are saved by a creepy ghostly creature. Five years later, Jeffrey's twin brother Lucas finds the children that were raised without social relationship and claim that they have been raised by Mama. Lucas disputes the custody with the children's grandmother but Dr. Dreyfuss, who is studying the girls, selects Lucas to take care of the children. Lucas lives with his girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain), who plays in a rock'n'roll band, and Victoria and Lilly moves to their house. Soon Lucas and Annabel find that the girls were not delusional and they are not alone in the house.
The cold opening scene where the father takes his kids to the cabin might be the most terrifying and heartbreaking opening of the year. It is so powerful that what follows after it seems quite mundane in comparison. Mama is quite refreshing in the sense that it fleshes out the kids characters unlike countless other horror movies which make them just caricatures and nothing else. The movie has a few genuine scary moments and is consistently creepy to th brim, but it should be viewed as a psychological drama first. If it weren't trapped in the horror genre, this could have been a great character study. There are a few jump scares and though I liked the ending, which I did not see coming, many might not feel the same way. Nikolaj (Jamie Lannister from Game of Thrones) and Jessica Chastain are good in their roles, but its the kids, Isabelle Nélisse and Megan Charpentier who are the real highlights of the movie. I also felt that Nikolaj's role was unnecessarily trimmed down instead of fleshing his character out more. The cgi kinda makes it hard to get scared when Mama is eventually revealed in all her special effects glory. Still, a good, original horror movie worth watching.
7/10