Mama

Inspired by a short film, Mama kicks off with a striking sequence in which a distressed businessman (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s Jeffrey) murders his wife and absconds with his two young daughters (Megan Charpentier’s Victoria and Isabelle Nélisse’s Lilly) to a remote cabin in the woods – with Jeffrey’s attempts at murdering his kids thwarted by a malevolent demon known only as Mama. After spending several years living in the woods with Mama, Victoria and Lilly are rescued and sent to live with Lucas (Coster-Waldau), Jeffrey’s brother, and Annabel (Jessica Chastain) – although, as expected, Mama doesn’t take too kindly to the intrusion. There’s ultimately little doubt that Mama fares best in its opening stretch, as filmmaker Andy Muschietti does a fantastic job of establishing an atmosphere of moody dread – with the partial reveal of the title character certainly as creepy and ominous as one might’ve hoped. It’s only as the movie segues into its narrative proper that the viewer’s interest slowly-but-surely begins to flag, with Muschietti’s decision to employ a pace that’s often suffocatingly deliberate draining the proceedings of its tension and, eventually, forcing the viewer to wish that the director would just get on with it, already (ie the novelty of Mama suddenly popping up behind unsuspecting characters wears off awfully quickly). The movie’s progressively uninvolving vibe is compounded by an increased emphasis on Annabel’s Ring-style investigation into Mama’s origins, while the anticlimactic finale, which is rife with second-rate computer-generated imagery, ensures that Mama ends on as underwhelming a note as one could possibly imagine. The end result is an almost typically disappointing modern ghost story that possesses few overtly positive attributes, which is a shame, really, given the potential afforded by both the stirring prologue and the impressive roster of performers.

** out of ****