Mama (Film Review)

*** Contains spoilers ***

Mama is a horror film produced by Guillermo del Toro and tells the story of a father who kill his estranged wife and goes on the run with his two daughters, one aged three and one aged only one year old. They speed away in his car but he loses control on the snowy roads and crashes, finding shelter in an old cabin in the woods. There, in grief, he tries to shoot his daughter but gets killed by a mysterious entity living in the cabin and his two girls grow up feral until their discovery several years later by a pair of men paid to find them by the man’s brother.

The children are then put in care to evaluate them before moving in with the brother and his rocker girlfriend into an observation house as they try to become part of society once more. But, as a doctor tries to discover what happened to the girls, the mysterious entity from the cabin is still with the children via a portal in the wardrobe and starts to cause problems for those around the girls who try to get too close.

As horror films go, ‘Mama’ is pretty unoriginal. There is a cabin in the woods, a mystery ghostly figure, lots of jumps and creepy moments. Characters seemingly only want to visit the cabin during the night and never in the middle of the day and there’s plenty of ‘don’t go near the woodpile moments’.

That said it’s a very creepy film with the feral-nature of the girls and the genuine creepy looking ‘mama’ being used to strong effect to creature spine-tingling chills. The plot is pretty standard but the scares are good though it does undermine all its hard work in the final ten minutes by turning mama’s fleeting appearances into a full-on expose of the phantom and it loses its magic and shock value accordingly, especially with an ending that doesn’t quite feel as scary as it should.

But there’s plenty to enjoy with lots of chilling moments and though it won’t win any prizes for originality, it ticks the boxes of a chilling horror with some intriguing set pieces, fleshed-out flashbacks, art-style, competent CGI and an obvious threat, and though it’s let down by the ending, the strong acting from the children, the effective use of lighting, the creepiness of the ‘choreography’ and the ability to pull it relatively well together make this an enjoyable horror flick.

Mama - 7/10