Director Andrés Muschietti’s debut feature, Mama, is a story about a ghostly maternal figure that was inspired by his 2008 short of the same name. The short was just a single scene wherein a couple of young girls get haunted by what is either a very unique take on a ghost or a meth addict who has broken into their home, but this feature expands the idea to include a whole story about two young girls (the impressive Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse) who are abandoned in the woods by their unhinged father, raised by an unpredictable spirit they call Mama, and then are found and adopted by their loving uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his child-weary girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain).
In many ways Mama is your typical ghost story. It features a wayward spirit who’s stuck playing out the same routine over and over, it gives us a group of living characters who are terrified by the ghost’s comings and goings, and it wraps itself up by having its protagonists realize that they have to help the ghost complete some bit of unfinished business if anyone is ever going to get any peace. There are two things that set Mama apart and make it unique, however. The first is its feral child element, wherein we get to watch two young girls who have lived out in the woods with only the protection of a dead lady reintegrate back into society. The second is the character arc Chastain’s Annabel takes. Originally it seems like Mama is going to be the girls’ story, and then maybe Coster-Waldau’s, but slowly things develop so that Chastain is brought to the forefront, and the movie is all the better because of it. That’s not only because Chastain is such a strong actress, but also because it’s very rare in a horror movie to get a three-dimensional, well-developed character who actually grows and changes over the course of the film, so the fact that Mama gives us one with Annabel makes it feel like a breath of fresh air. This isn’t just a ghost story, it’s a story about people too.
That doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t have its own, unique faults though. The primary one is that, even at only 100 minutes, Mama fails to maintain its momentum all the way to the end. There are a handful of moody, evocative scenes that feel like they could have been really great sequels to the original Mama short, but there are also long stretches of time where the film just feels like it’s killing time, going back over ground that it’s already covered, and it can become something of a bore. It doesn’t help that we see so much of the titular ghost either. What starts off as a creepy, unsettling creature lurking in the shadows eventually becomes something of a mundane figure after we learn everything there is to know about it and see it traipsing about the house as a well-lit, full-bodied apparition more times than can be counted. The fear of the unknown is one of the most powerful weapons in a horror movie’s arsenal, and in treating its monster as a subject to be studied, Mama ends up shooting blanks by the time it gets to its third act.
