Another promising concept falls apart

Rating: 4/10 (10 December 2013)

I was hoping there would be a way to write this review without adding any spoilers, but the ending of this movie is so awful that it is unavoidable. "Mama" is the story of two young girls who are abandoned in the forest for five years, and are discovered then brought back to civilization with the hope of rehabilitating and reintroducing them to a normal life. What is largely unseen for most of the movie is what the children describe as "Mama", a ghostly creature that had watched over them during their abandonment, and who is now jealous of their new found family life.
What works in this movie are the strong performances by the young girls, unsure of their new environment, and trying in their own elementary way to explain to other adults who "Mama" is. And for most of the movie, we only get glimpses of "Mama", and the less-is-more visualization works for the audience. We learn through the research of the child psychiatrist assigned to the girls that "Mama" is really a woman from 1800's who killed herself and her infant after escaping from an insane asylum. We are told that ghosts from the past return and torment those in the present until some wrong is righted. This could have sufficed to end this movie with an acceptable conclusion - but this movie went too far, including the unnecessary death of one of the young girls at the end.
We see the wrong righted with the return of the skeleton of Mama's infant baby returned to Mama, reminiscent of the way that Johnny Depp tossed the head of the Headless Horseman to Christopher Walken in "Sleepy Hollow", leaving no further need for violence. But for reasons not easily explained, Mama felt the need to take one of the living children with her after she had gotten what she came for. Furthermore, when Mama is made visible to the adults and children at the end of the movie, she looked more cartoonish than scary, and became a caricature of the terrifying ghost represented earlier. A very disappointing ending to a film that showed promise.