Mama Review

http://bloody-disgusting.com/film/113269/mama-2/

 Mama  is a feature-Length expansion of a short created in 2008 which Andy Mushietti created alongside his sister. The plot follows two young girls and their devilish upbringing after a series of events that occurred through their early adolescents. 

Before arriving at the cinema, my expectations were that this film was going to be scary, it’s going to make the audience jump and scream. As I arrived to a packed out screen there were rows upon rows of scared faces, I would say around 75% came out wondering why they went in with such fear. This film in my opinion could have been a lot of scarier in many different ways. 

Before I go into that, the casting I have to say was great. The 1 -year –old Lily and 3-year-old Victoria played their roles excellently but the stand out performance was that of the 6-year-old Lily (Isabelle Nélisse) and 8-year-old Victoria (Megan Charpentier).  

The prologue shows the audience, we learn of a shooting that takes place and then a hurried man by the name of Lucas comes rushing into a bedroom to collect his little girls, clearly showing signs of tension and fear; he grabs them and drives off.  Further along on his journey to nowhere, the roads become increasingly slippy and the car goes over and crashes. After that it shows the three arriving at an abandoned house deep in the woods, we then see Lucas attempt to kill his daughters before taking his own life.

That, however, did not go as planned.

Five-years later and the girls still haven’t been seen or heard from. All hope is lost apart from their uncle Jeffrey who is still hot on the case and has investigators scouring the forests nearby. Obviously, these guys were bound to come across an abandoned shack soon after discovering a car that had crashed down a hill. Sure enough as they ventured inside they came across some animal like people, these were the bodies of the two girls; each covered in mud and running round like wild animals.

The Girls were then kept for observations in a mental institute and one that is quite noticeable is Victoria keeps making references to an unseen Mama. Little did Jeffrey and wife Annabel (Jessica Chastain) know that this was only the start of what was to be a chilling encounter with the unknown.

One of the major let downs for me was the computer imagery with ‘Mama’. She looked very unrealistic and for a horror I believe the more realistic the more scarier the film will be.Saying this, however, the two girls at the beginning when they are found in the house in their animalistic state is very well animated. If this followed throughout, I believe the film would have been much more telling. For long durations of the movie, we don’t actually see mama and seeing what she looked like and how poorly I believe she was generated, they should have kept it that way.

There were positives I picked up on. Firstly, the dream sequences that involve some sort of Japanese feel to them which emphasizes on the horror factor. The comedic level is raised slightly and it was funny, possibly more funny than horror in some cases. A particular shot was when Lily is giggling off-screen in one third and in the far third, Annabel is going about household chores oblivious to the fact Lily is flying all over the room.

This is a pleasing film, but not one for people expecting a proper horror. There will be times in which the film will give you a fright and then times where it will just make you question how bad it was.

I would recommend seeing this film if you're one of horrors but don’t expect too much. The idea and concept behind it are there an it does have a great story to it, the graphics just let it down considerably. 

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