Mama

Yesterday's horror film:

10/17: For today's film I watched Mama, continuing what seems to be a ghost/evil mother/Guillermo del Toro (in the producers chair here, not the directors) trend I seem to be on. I think after today I'm going to need a little "haunting" break, but luckily Mama is a surprisingly good film.

Mama centers around a young punk-y couple (Jaime Lannister and Jessica Chastain) whose two nieces are taken by their crazed father (Jaime Lannister too! They're twins). He shoots up his work, kills his wife, and drives the girls out to the middle of nowhere to kill them too but at the last second is stopped by a dark entity. Jump to five years later and the two girls are found feral in an isolated forest cabin. The couple must take them in and work with their wild behavior while also dealing with this dark entity tormenting them.

I have to hand it to Mama, while it widely adheres to the tropes of a haunting film it does more than enough to shake it up. The way Mama is portrayed coupled with the absolutely creepy little girls is genuinely horrifying and gets under your skin. The acting too, especially by the little girls (namely the youngest actress who apparently didn't speak any English) is stellar. The youngest niece crawls and speaks in a way reminiscent of Regan in The Exorcist; honestly, what better horror compliment can I give than that? The dynamic the movie sets up between Jessica Chastain's character of the reluctant, unwilling surrogate mother and the heartbreaking tragedy of these two young girls' lives is really what makes the film genuinely different and notable.

Mama is a modern horror film that doesn't get anywhere near the hype it deserves (seriously, The Babadook over this?) and is a truly great haunting film. The final act is a little wonky and on-the-nose revealing, but with the rest of what's good here I didn't mind much.

8.5/10