“A ghost is an emotion bent out of shape, condemned to repeat itself, time and time again until it rights the wrong that was done.”

As the story goes, master of horror Guillermo del Toro saw Andy Muschietti’s three minute horror film—just a scene, really—and was so affected by it that he stepped in and secured funding for the untested director to expand his little passion project into a feature. In collaboration with his sister Barbara Muschietti and novelist and television writer Neil Cross, Muschietti fleshed out his script with a handful of additional characters and a backstory for his supernatural villain. Swap in some English-speaking actors, slather on a thick layer of ethereal atmosphere, and this thing was bound to make some money if he could keep the scares up for its duration. He succeeded, and it made bank—raking in almost 10x its budget. But it also falls victim to an annoying trend in supernatural horror where the film will start with a spooky initial premise and decent characters before devolving into a morass of horror clichés, dry explanations of the supernatural, and by-the-numbers jump scares. That Mama manages to be enjoyable despite falling into such formulaic territory is a testament to Muschietti’s skill as a stylist. He really knows how to stage and film a scary scene, but his writing and poor implementation of CGI let him down.

In the fallout of the financial crash of 2008, a decimated stockbroker goes nuts, shoots up his office, then heads home and kills his wife. He scoops up his daughters, puts them in the car, and speeds recklessly into the mountains. He flips the car over a steep bank and then aimlessly wanders into the woods with his daughters, where they stumble across an abandoned cabin—the abode of Mama. Daddy meets his fate in a matter of minutes, and then we jump ahead five years. Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), twin brother of the stockbroker, is spending his last savings on yet another futile search for his brother and nieces. His hired rednecks, who spend their days wasting his money by sitting on a log, getting drunk, and shooting the breeze, stumble across the dilapidated cabin and find the two girls. They’ve seemingly been living all by themselves for five years. After some time with Dr. Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash), Victoria (Megan Charpentier) regains a limited ability to speak, while Lily (Isabelle Nélisse) remains a feral little monster, crawling around inhumanly and making weird noises. To retain custody, Lucas and his punk rocker girlfriend (Jessica Chastain) move into a house that is set aside for Dr. Dreyfuss’s special case studies.

But all that’s just setting us up to put Annabel alone in the house with the two girls and Mama. It becomes apparent to Lucas and Annabel very quickly that Mama is more than just an imaginary guardian that the girls conjured up while fending for themselves in the woods. Initially we only catch brief glimpses of Mama or see her presence as decay and black moths, but it doesn’t take long for Muschietti to put Mama on screen—a spectral herky-jerky CGI creation utilizing Javier Botet, a lanky, double-jointed actor who’s portrayed monsters in films like REC, The Conjuring 2, and It (also directed by Muschietti). It is disappointing to see footage of Botet’s motion tests, which are legitimately terrifying, compared to the shaky CGI concoction that appears on screen and is much less scary. I get that Botet can’t levitate like Mama, but I feel like this was a huge misstep. Having Mama contort herself into these impossible shapes and hover around and crawl on walls is cool and all, but unnecessary. And she doesn’t need to be on screen as much as she is. If Muschietti could have just calmed himself down a bit and let Mama haunt us from the periphery much less horrible CGI would have been required.

Anyway, at one point Lucas gets spooked so badly that he flips himself over the bannister and rolls down the stairs, leaving him in a coma. At this point the film kind of loses control of itself. There are a few very creepy scenes mixed in, but there’s a lot of Annabel wandering around the under-lit house asking the girls what’s in the closet, what’s behind me, what’s under the bed? It works when Mama is not just jump-scaring but providing unsettling moments, such as when Annabel sees Lily tugging on a blanket through a doorway and assumes that she’s playing with her sister, but then sees Victoria and realizes that something else is in the house. But Annabel perseveres much longer than we can take seriously. She begins experiencing first person point-of-view dreams of herself carrying a baby and stabbing nuns (these nightmare sequences are creatively constructed, for what it’s worth), and asks Dreyfuss about it. He does some investigating and discovers that Victoria’s recounting of Mama’s life, which he assumed was made up, is actually a true story of an escaped asylum patient named Edith Brennan. Many of the details here are provided by Dreyfuss’s oddly knowledgeable secretary (Elva Mai Hoover).

But then the characters start acting out simply to move the plot forward. Dreyfuss, in particular, turns into a flimsy character. He had gone through all this trouble to get the children into his special case study house, but then neglects them and pursues the origins of Mama instead of the health of the children. He decides to investigate the cabin at night with a faulty flashlight (which gives Muschietti the opportunity to use Hitchcock’s flashbulb trick from Rear Window) and is killed. The explanation behind Mama’s actions ends up feeling very shallow as well. Basically, Mama wants to commit suicide again, with a living child since her own baby survived the first attempt. Annabel even steals the dead baby’s remains and offers them to Mama but Mama decides that she wants to kill Lily instead.

If all you want to do is be scared a few times and have enough of a plot to make it seem believable while you’re watching it, Mama has got you covered. The cast is solid and Muschietti does a great job of making the most of his spotty script. But the attempt at depth is misguided, its exposition is clumsy, and the CGI sucks too much of the real horror out of Mama’s appearance. The core idea has a lot of promise and Muschietti is definitely on top of the direction, but he simply failed to expand his short film into a compelling feature length script. With such a strong team, it’s disappointing that the film basically amounts to “what was that?!” moments repeated ad nauseam.

Sources:
Nemiroff, Perri. “‘Mama’ Motion Test Footage is Scarier Than the Film”. Screen Rant. 28 January 2013.