We’ve come to expect a lot from Guillermo del Toro, wouldn’t you say? Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone are, I would say, alternative modern classics, using the supernatural and fantastic in innovative new ways to remind us of our sense of childhood wonder. Hellboy and Hellboy 2: The Golden Army were mighty impressive visually. And Pacific Rim, del Toro’s next directing project finally coming out in theaters next year, looks pretty much amazing.
But what del Toro has done for
years, and which is kind of annoying, is produce films from up-and-coming
filmmakers he takes under his wing. I’m not knocking the second part of
that—mentorship is good, mentorship is nice, yay, collaboration! So often,
however, what comes of this cooperation is a film that feels very much like del
Toro’s vision infringed on the overall rest of the narrative, like he just
added some stuff he’s known for so people would certainly recognize his
influence. It happened with The Orphanage and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, and
now it’s happened with Mama, from director Andrés Muschietti.
Five years ago, Muschietti made a
three-minute short film, Mamá, about two little girls trapped in a house with a
horrifying, disfigured ghost that claimed it was their mother. It was brief and
visceral and had a great gotcha! moment, and I had nightmares for an entire
weekend after watching it. So del Toro saw the potential in that short and
encouraged Muschietti to make it into a full-length film; along with his wife
Barbara and co-writer Neil Cross, Muschietti did just that. And, well,
feature-length Mama just isn’t that good. It’s not as thrilling or enthralling
or horrifying. It’s just another mediocre ghost story with some mediocre CGI.
Whomp whomp.
Mama is about young sisters (Megan
Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse), whose financier father goes on a
killing spree, murdering his business partners, his wife, and almost them
before something swoops down and kills him.
Left in a cabin for five years with the ghost looking after them, Victoria and
Lilly become animalistic and unsocialized, crawling around on all fours,
surviving on cherries, and only saying the word “mama.” It’s a weird family
dynamic, to say the least.
But Victoria and Lilly leave that
life behind when they’re finally found and go live with their uncle Lucas
(Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), their father’s brother, and his girlfriend Annabel
(Jessica Chastain). Lucas is an artist and Annabel is a hard rocker, complete
with Goth makeup and accessories, and at first it seems like the transition won’t
work well either for them or the girls. A rich doctor, Gerald Dreyfuss, (Daniel
Kash), puts them up in a nice house, though, so he can study the girls, and
soon things begin to thaw out. Victoria starts speaking like a normal person
again. She eats regular food. She sleeps in a bed. And her behavior is in
marked contrast to Lilly, who keeps wandering around the house, eating bugs,
and cavorting with their supernatural friend. One girl wants to leave the past
behind; one girl doesn’t. But Mama doesn’t want just one.
So much of the film is about this
grappling between Victoria and Lilly on a child level and Mama and Annabel on
an adult level, both of them fighting about whether to hold on to or let go of
the past. But what the narrative doesn’t do is explore the resentment that can
develop between family members, the itch of jealousy or favoritism. Instead,
Annabel is very clearly the hero against Mama, who lets her personal trauma
overwhelm her identity. Something interesting could have been done with the
themes of maternal feeling and smothering, but instead we just get lame
flashbacks about Mama’s previous life, which turns out to be very ho-hum
indeed. Think last year’s The Woman in Black, and you’ll basically get it.
It’s not that the performances are
bad: Chastain has never been anything but fully committed in any role she’s
ever had; Coster-Waldau is charming and likable; and the girls, Charpentier and
Nélisse, are excellent either in creepy mode or when cleaned-up. Similar praise
should be given to 7-foot-tall Javier Botet, who portrays Mama before layers of
CGI are added on top of him to make him a female ghost.
But good acting can’t forgive bad
effects or narrative choices, and yes, there are a lot of those. Mama looks too
much like the soul-sucking Dementor villains from the Harry Potter series, and her
varying traits—fangs, tentacles, claws, really long limbs that allow her to
move around like a spider—take her out of ghost territory and into something
different that’s never explained. The final chase defies the internal logic the
film has already built. And though the film has a few solid gotcha! moments,
they lack the impact of the initial short film.
Muschietti has more space for
his idea in this feature version of Mama, but it’s actually to his detriment. I know it's a movie review cliche, but still: The original was better.
2.5 out of 5 Guttenbergs
