Doesn't Stink!

Rating: Null/10 (24 March 2020)

This movie's been out a long time now. I've just finished watching it here in the throes of coronavirus pandemic March when it's a 2013 piece and I only learned of it via Cordery FX and his excellent YouTube channel.
I still put off watching it quite some time. I watch so many dreadful movies. This one though, is actually one I can recommend. It's reminiscent of Nell, the 1994 Jodie Foster movie - if Nell and her sister had been raised by the murderous ghost of an escaped mental patient from the Edwardian period. If Nell and The Babadook did the fusion dance. Glad I finally got around to seeing it.
I love ghost stories, I'm fascinated by feral children and this movie actually made me feel things. I see so much pure garbage, I forget that movies are supposed to make you feel things.
The child actresses were uncommonly brilliant, there's no happy ending, the Mama is left morally ambiguous.
I had some issue with the CG effects. The schitck to this movie is, the Mama comes from a CGI hole in a wall - which moths fly out of. The Mama moves in that scrawny, jerky, twisted way ghost effects are created these days. Sure, she's creepy, but we've seen this method too many times to be frightened. The Mama's voice is something between a bear and a pigeon, a coo and roar at once, which when phrased that way is symbolic.
The main character in this movie is the uncle's girlfriend. Not only is it refreshing to see an uncle be treated as a sympathetic character in a movie, the girlfriend is pushed to the forefront when the Mama tries to kill him and he is sidelined in hospital. I enjoy those different sort of treatments in character writing. Though there is a scene where we area asked to believe a Bloodhound could track a 5 year old trail (I'm a former dog trainer - that's so absurdly a c'mon, man - that well, just forget about it) but those are my only gripes. Mama is one of the better movies I've seen in a long time.
Yes, it has predictable components, but it's far from the same old same old in ghost stories.
"It's about family."
Family and obsession and love and torment and death.