Ma

Game, Vet and Matched

Ma
USA 2019 
Directed by Tate Taylor
UK cinema release print.

Warning: This review will contain some story spoilers. Read at your own risk or, you know, come back and read it after you saw the movie, perhaps?

So, Ma, is one of those movies that tries to do a few simple things at once and, mostly, succeeds at the majority of them on some level. It stars Octavia Spencer as the titular character, a veteranarian's assistant... and she puts in a good performance in a movie that is both trying to paint a character who is justified in becoming the twisted individual she has progressed to when we join her in the story and then give us a few lurid thrills over the course of the movie and in the end game... as Ma goes on a kind of roaring rampage of revenge, to quote a much loved movie.

Well, it’s certainly not a terrible film, for sure and I did kind of enjoy it because it rambles along at its own pace and it’s just intriguing enough to hold the attention while Spencer and a bunch of teenage kids, played by people like Diana Silvers and McKaley Miller start having alcohol fuelled parties in Ma’s basement. Silvers plays Maggie, who has moved into town with her mother Erica, played by Juliette Lewis, to start a new life and, within a day, is invited to join the local kids in their shenanigans and, after they are trying to get adults to buy their alcohol for them... have their first meeting with Ma who enters their lives and, ultimately, refuses to leave.

The film does the, perhaps obvious, thing where they set up just how Ma’s mental state can turn on a dime fairly early on in the proceedings, to keep the audience on edge... and then goes on cruise control for a while as it establishes the parents of the kids, including Luke Evans who was so great in Professor Marston And The Wonder Women (reviewed here) and starts weaving plot threads together with a series of flashbacks, not all of them linear in nature, to show the audience how connected things really are and why this chance meeting with Ma may not necessarily be as spontaneous as the various kids thought.

Okay so... it’s not breakneck but pacey without resorting to peril every five mins and it involves enough suspense in it, via the old cliché of “the forbidden area” of Ma’s home, to hold the interest. The performances are okay and, surprisingly for a film of this nature... and this is one thing it gets really right... you don’t completely hate the various teenagers who are put in peril. The usual way these movies work these days is to somehow have a bunch of teenage characters that only teenagers can relate to... thus rendering the empathy for the teen protagonists completely non existent and you’re usually cheering on the malevolent antagonist to get on with their work. Here, the kids are mostly quite sweet and so you do feel yourself getting at least a little pulled into their world and the threat that Ma brings to it.

It’s definitely a film which roots itself firmly in the thriller genre rather than horror... there’s no supernatural presence or inhuman monster to bring a sense of terror to the shenanigans... and sadly, it fails to be as potent in both the violence and the final reveal of the trigger from Ma’s past that’s made the switch in her head flip and set her on her ultimately murderous course.  By that I mean that when you realise that the flashbacks are building to a certain kind of denouement, what the audience can imagine happened is probably far worse and icky than what you ultimately see. Also, some of the things that Ma does to various teens in this world maybe loses the impact when you can see exactly the same kinds of things done as leisure activities on various dark porn sites on the internet. It’s not that some of the stuff isn’t nasty... it’s just that you do get a feel by the final sequences that this film is perhaps a little out of step with its time and that maybe, if the same film was released in the early 1960s, it would have been a much more potent and possibly influential film than it seems to be now.

That being said, there are some genuinely well executed jump scares in the movie and, as I said, it’s sufficiently entertaining to breeze its way through to the final set piece without getting dull for the paying customers. It’s the kind of thing that goes down well with teenage audiences and I can’t imagine it won't make its budget back fairly quickly, to be honest. That being said, if you are expecting a well oiled horror movie or even a competent teenage slasher movie... you may be a little disappointed with Ma. It’s not that it’s not well done but perhaps that’s part of the problem I had with it a little bit. It doesn’t have any kind of raw edge to it and, sometimes, a film of this nature can be a little too polished. All in all though, I thought the film was nice enough for a one off watch... charming even, so if you’ve got no other films at the cinema that you want to see, this one’s maybe worth a look.