25.
Mama (HBO Go)
I really want to know Jessica Chastain's rationale for taking this role. She was on a roll in 2011 (
Take Shelter,
Coriolanus,
The Debt,
The Tree of Life,
The Help) with roles with acclaimed directors, and she continued the roll in 2012 with a bit of a cash-in (
Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted), a film that aspired to be a critical hit (
Lawless) and a film that was both a critical and commercial hit (
Zero Dark Thirty) that raised her profile to its arguable peak.
She follows all that up with
Mama, a film by a first-time director based on his short film. Guillermo del Toro was the executive director, but he was probably busy wrapping up
Pacific Rim, so how involved would del Toro have been in
Mama? Furthermore, Chastain traded her trademark red hair for very short, very black hair in
Mama. It worked out for her:
Mama's grossed almost $140 million worldwide, but it sticks out like a sore thumb in her filmography.
I had concerns that this would be this year's marathon's equivalent of
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2011), which was also produced by Guillermo del Toro and featured a woman reluctantly becoming a mother to a girl with whom she had at best a tangential relationship and is haunted by supernatural beings. I found
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2011) pretty underwhelming last year, but I was pleasantly surprised by how effective
Mama was.
The del Toro influence is much more apparent from the start.
Mama, like
Pan's Labyrinth, carried a fairy tale vibe from the start, where it showed Nikolaj Coster-Waldau playing twin brothers (a common fairy tale trope), two children led into the dark and snowy forest by their evil father (like in "Hansel and Gretel"), a creature that was punished adults by protected children, and children being the only ones who can communicate with the creature. The ending, which is surprisingly dark and might seem like a poorly conceived cop-out, accentuated the film's overall fairy tale vibe.
Coster-Waldau doesn't get a lot to do once we're past the beginning when he played the twins, so it's left to Chastain to hold up the film along with the child actresses hired to play the girls, who are Coster-Waldau's character's nieces. Chastain played the reluctant mother very well; I smiled a bit when she was able to break through to the younger girl's character, who was still feral after being recovered with her sister from five years of living in wilderness after their father tried unsuccessfully to kill them in a forest cabin. And the determination she showed in the last scene as her character tried to prevent the older girl from leaving with the titular Mama was effective.
I was surprised by how openly and frequently the film showed the Mama creature. The special effects are good, but most horror films would opt to only hint at the creature until the climactic reveal. Instead, we get several good glimpses at the creature throughout the film, and the climactic reveal shows not the creature's monstrosity but its beauty and tragedy.
Andres Muschietti, the co-writer and director, came up with some very creative scenes. He loves his lateral transitions, as if the movie were a stage play. The camera moves from one room in the house to another neither by tracking the camera through the hallway nor by cutting but by moving the camera through the walls of the house along a lateral axis from one room to another. One scene early in the film sticks in my mind: we look down a hallway in the house. On the left side of the screen, we see Chastain climb stairs. She's about to turn into the hallway and walk toward the camera, but she's stopped by the older girl. On the right side of the screen, we see into the girls' room, where the younger girl is playing tug of war with a blanket with someone who is obscured by a wall by is clearly taller than the girl based on the angle at which the blanket is held. As the older girl talks to Chastain on the right, we see the younger girl disappear in her room. The older girl follows Chastain back downstairs, and we see the younger girls feet fly through the air while she laughs gleefully. We never see Mama in that scene, but we have an idea of the younger girl's relationship with it, an idea of her size, and her powers. It's a confident, well-executed scene.
The sepia-toned first person perspective dream sequence that Chastain has that shows her Mama's origin from Mama's perspective was also very well done. The flashbulb effect Muschietti used in another scene was also a nice touch.
Muschietti reproduces the horror short
"Mama" almost word-for-word in the film, but it has a slightly different context than the original short. It was a nice touch for viewers who had seen the original short.
On the other hand, I wish Muschietti had not written so many scares that relied on characters waking up from dreams. At one point, Chastain's character wakes up to see the older girl watching her fearfully from her doorway. Mama rises up from behind Chastain and consumes her. Then Chastain wakes up again. It felt like a cheap scare that played with the film's sense of reality without much pay-off.
