Good but not Great

Rating: 6/10 (16 January 2013)

"Mama" comes with a fantastic pedigree. It is produced by Guillermo del Toro, and directed by Andy Muschietti, who has adapted its own wonderful short movie "Mama" (2008; you can find it on Youtube). The trailer was also exceedingly good, so my expectations were reasonably high---but they were disappointed.
"Mama" tells the story of two little girls who are abandoned in the woods after losing both parents in tragic circumstances. They are found after 5 years in horrible conditions: feral and dirty, they crawl on four legs and move like an animal. Everybody assumes that the girls have survived on their own in the woods. Unfortunately, that is not quite the case. And, when their uncle and auntie take them in with them (helped by a shady psychiatrist), the frightening truth comes out.
"Mama" has a few stunning visuals and delivers the promised amount of scares. It does juggle well the balance between suspense and sudden jumps, and it is a quite enjoyable horror movie, several steps above the average horror flick. The disjointed figure that moves at unnatural speed (which made the short movie famous in the first place) is eerie, scary, fresh, and beautiful at the same time. The trick of speeding-up movements to create a sense of supernatural pace is used for the girls too (when they crawl on all fours at impossible speeds), and it works perfectly.
However, "Mama" never quite overcomes its origins---that is, a short movie that has been stretched out to full-feature length. In this stretching-out process, some additions were made that work perfectly (the story arch of the girls left alone in the woods, and found in a feral state), and some were made that simply don't work at all (the titular character's background story is cheesy, the psychiatrist is introduced simply as an excuse to explain parts of the plot, then quickly dismissed). Like many horrors, Mama works when each scene is taken in isolation, but does not work as a whole because the screenplay does not quite organize the brilliant seminal idea in a proper way. Some dialog is just too bad; some characters undeveloped; some plot twists forced; some background explanations unnecessary and prosaic.
Somehow, the problems of structuring the original ideas into a full-length storyline ends up compromising the movie's visuals, which are its strongest point. The special effects for the main character work beautifully as long as it makes only brief appearances. But the extended storyline requires it to be seen on screen for longer periods of time towards the end, and, as the titular creature is seen more and more, it loses its realism and begins to look like cheap CGI, glossy, fake, translucent and not quite believable enough to be genuinely scary. This is a mistake that, for instance, last year's superior "The Woman in Black" cleverly avoided making.
In summary, the movie is an above-average horror that could have been a great horror, but fell short of accomplishing its potential.