Mama Mia! - Mama review

The key attribute of any horror director is an awareness of the framing of their image. Horror is a genre of audience manipulation more so than any other. When a film all comes together and is actually frightening it is because the director has known just what to show and what to keep away, hidden in the shadows. With his first foray into feature filmmaking, Mama, Andrés Muschietti shows a talent for well-orchestrated scares and an understanding for suggestion but ultimately suffers from overexposing the antagonising spectre, ‘Mama’.

Based on siblings Andrés and Barbara Muschietti’s 2008 short of the same name, Mama follows Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and punk-rocker partner Annabel (Jessica Chastain, in an uncharacteristically unlikable turn). As they take in Lucas’ practically feral nieces, the true scale of their recent acquisition is revealed all too quickly. Really, that’s Mama’s key failing, the lank, floating Mama is shown far too eagerly. The floating figure is at her most frightening when heard moaning and clicking, teasing something far more sinister and unworldly just out of frame.

Mama loosely plays on the idea of fear of parenthood but doesn’t have the conviction or the wit to hold up on an allegorical level in the same way the greatest horror films do. Mama does work as basic shocker in the same vein as Sinister and The Woman in Black. For the landscape of horror, this shift away from torture porn and found-footage films can only be a good sign, given the lack of truly outstanding American horror movies in recent years. Mama admirably paves the way for a return to a higher class of horror and with the likes of Stoker and Maniac on the horizon it is time that bold, innovative and genuinely scary horror films to makes an overdue comeback.