Frightening, un-gorified

Rating: 7/10 (3 February 2013)

Mama is a pretty frightening movie, even for jaded scare freaks, about possession and asylums and demons and whatnot. It's not that it's not for the faint of heart - it's only PG-13, for goodness sake - it's that the scares are as psychological as they are visual. It's very well crafted, with an atypical ending and top-notch performances by a pair of young girls. It does dabble in some horror tropes and lapses in logic, but overall it's very successful at what it tries to be - a movie that burrows into your head to make you wonder what is coming next.
Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nelisse) are two very young girls whose father suddenly comes home one day and takes them away - "Mommy's sick" - to an isolated cabin in the middle of a snowstorm, and then he's gone. Don't ask me how or why; it'll spoil things. This leaves the girls - aged three and one (!) to fend for themselves. They are found five years later, and after the quickest custody battle of all time, they are handed over to their Uncle Luke (Nikolaj Coaster-Waldau) and his rock-band girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain, seriously). To facilitate the handover, Dr. Dreyfuss, who has been studying the girls, sets them all up in a nice new house, the better to get unfettered access to them. After all, they've been feral for five years. Young Lilly almost never walks upright. Victoria retains some memories of life before losing her mom and dad, but even she harbors some very dark secrets - after all, who's been feeding the girls all this time?
Shortly into the movie, Luke is incapacitated and endures a hospital stay, while Annabel - who had been considering leaving him - is stuck with two very unorthodox sisters with a mysterious past. Maybe some nurturing is in order, but it doesn't seem to be rocker Annabel's thing. Even so, she loves Luke enough to give it a go until he can return home. That's when all hell breaks loose. You see, readers, it seems something has followed the girls from that lone cabin in the woods, something that had been protecting it, something that sees Luke and Annabel as intruders, not helpers. Something...well, something not good. Things happen in the house that prove to be very unsettling to Annabel; the girls seem to have a new, unseen playmate but remain mostly incommunicado. It's not quite Amityville Horror-level, with bleeding walls and such, but it's not a relaxing environment. Only Lilly seems at ease; Annabel knows something is up but has no idea what's in store for her, and Victoria is caught in the middle, having known a life before the abandonment.
One of the treasures of this movie is in piecing together what's happened to launch all events into motion. Why did the dad take the girls away? Where is the mom? You have to listen closely to news reports - which usually feel like nothing more than background noise - to learn the truth.
One side note about Chastain - she is virtually unrecognizable. Gone is the flowing red hair. She looks more like Courtney Cox in the Scream movies. She does fine with the material she has to work with, in fact a bit better.
It's a dark, dark movie, Mama is. Who is Mama? Is it the girls' mother, not really dead? Is it her ghost? Is it someone else? Is it no one else - an imaginary friend created by the girls to cope with living alone? It takes the adults in the movie about as long to figure it out as it will take the average viewer, and that's a good thing. Motives are not always obvious, and research - by Dreyfuss - is undertaken. This movie manages to pull off the trick of including a scary demon/ghost/whatever without showing her too fully (as in bright light or even fully formed). There are just enough unanswered questions - too many, and it's a flawed film, and too few and it's an overly neat film. And even though we can all guess where all roads lead in a geographic sense, the ending is a solid, plausible, emotional surprise.