well done and beautiful

Rating: 7/10 (19 May 2013)

In 2008, the Argentine Andrés Muschietti directed "Mama", a 3-minute short-film that Guillermo del Toro watched and liked so much that he decided to produce a longer feature. In the 2008 version, a little girl wakes her sister up in the middle of the night and tells her that "Mama" is back. They both go downstairs in an empty house. They see something that looks like a woman moving in a room at the end of the hall. The "thing" is threatening. The music is nagging and throbbing. Something is going to happen. Mama walks out of the room and runs at abnormal speed toward the children. She is barefoot and her body is deformed. The girls scream and run back to the first floor. The younger girl slams the bedroom's door and leaves the older out. She looks at Mama moving toward her. The thing's walk is dislocated, her face is hideous. The music panics. The girl screams. The end. The same scene is present in the 2013 movie, which is an enhanced and more explicit version of this primitive scene. After he lost it and killed his wife and co-workers, Jeffrey (best known under the name of Jaime Lannister) runs away with his daughters. They have an accident on the road and find refuge in a cabin by the lake in the middle of the wood. There, Jeffrey plans to shoot her daughters than kill himself, but the ghost in the cabin prevents it and takes care of him. Five years later, two detectives paid by Lucas, Jeffrey's twin brother, finally find the crashed car and the cabin with the girls. They are alive but they live in a wild primitive state and they pretend that they were raised by a supernatural entity they call "Mama". Lucas and her girlfriend Anabel (Jessica Chastain, the actress-chameleon) are thirty something but they live like teenagers. He draws and she plays the guitar in a rock band. Nevertheless, the psychiatrist in charge of the girls decide to give them custody and to lend them a house to raise the girls in proper conditions. As it is often the case, joint custody does not go well and Mama is jealous of the girls' new parents. Childhood is a recurring theme in horror movies. The child is innocent, fragile and defenceless against evil and the corruption of the adults' world. But what the horror genre is interested in is the reversal, and loss, of values, the devilish side of the angels' faces. The trope of the child-victim and child-killer is almost as old as the horror genre itself. After initial ambiguity, the film chooses one unequivocal representation of the child as basically pure and good. Adults don't need to protect themselves from them, they need to protect them. The film is actually pretty unsurprising and uses some of the genre's most common clichés and twists : a cabin in the wood, people visiting the cabin in the middle of the night, scary dolls, weird children, a ghost in the closet, a crazy mother, heavy music, etc. But "Mama" is a genre movie that fully acknowledges these stereotypes. And it works. Muschietti's directing is clever and effective. The main interest of the film is the characterization of Jeffrey, Anabel, the girls AND the ghost. Muschietti managed to find a right balance to make them "real" and make the viewer care for all of them. They are not mere embodiments. Even Mama is not pure evil, she is ambivalent, both motherly and destructive. The film is less based on violence than on anguish. Some ideas I thought were interesting, for example the physical concretization of the haunted house theme. The film is all about atmosphere, about something that is there, lurking, that kills not out of pleasure but because it is suffering. It lives in the walls, it becomes the walls, it corrupts them. It lives in corpses, but it is not really living, it's only articulated death. It takes possession of people's dreams, but it still remains estranged from the living world. Only the child can communicate with it, and love it, because only the child can see the living and the dead as two different but equal things. The end is not like any conventional Hollywood ending. Only that suffices to make the film interesting. But it's not only that. There's beauty in "Mama", there's an impossible love, there's black and troubling poetry. Read my blog for other reviews: http://filmcritiks.wordpress.com/