What critics are saying about ‘Mama’

TORONTO – The reviews are in for Mama, one of this weekend’s new movie releases.

The horror flick, shot last year in Southern Ontario, stars Jessica Chastain and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as a couple raising two young girls (B.C.’s Megan Charpentier and Quebec’s Isabelle Nélisse) with a mystery past.

“Beautifully envisioned, badly constructed, the only truly terrifying things … are the fake tattoos, short black hair and black T-shirts meant to turn Zero Dark Thirty star Jessica Chastain into a guitar-shredding, punk rocker chick,” opined Betsy Sharkey in her review in the L.A. Times. “Rather than dishing out pure scary movie chills, first-time director Andy Muschietti serves up a darkly twisted allegory about a mother’s protective instincts. Which would have been an excellent framing device, and infinitely more satisfying for grown-ups, if he had pulled it off. He doesn’t quite.”

In the New York Times, reviewer Manohla Dargis wrote that Mama “offers a strong sense of time and place, along with the kind of niceties that don’t often figure into horror flicks, notably pictorial beauty, an atmosphere throbbing with dread and actors so good that you don’t want anyone to take an ax to them.”

Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter called Mama “a playful, elegantly made little horror film” that relies too much upon “loud and abrupt musical cues to unsettle the viewer.”

He wrote: “In essence, Mama represents a throwback and a modest delight for people who like a good scare but prefer not to be terrorized or grossed out. With fine special effects and a good sense of creating a mood and pacing the jolts, Andy Muschietti shows a reassuringly confident hand for a first-time director, pulling off some fine visual coups through smart camera placement and cutting, and not taking the whole thing so seriously that it becomes overwrought.”

On the horror website ShockTillYouDrop.com, Edward Douglas said the movie “sometimes suffers whenever it tries to set up scares we’ve experienced in other movies” but praised the talent both in front and behind the camera. Douglas said Muschietti “creates a lush film with solid production values with evocative production design and a mix of CG and practical FX that proves him to be a fine new horror talent.”

In Macleans, reviewer Brian D. Johnson wrote: “It’s got a strong visual style, and the narrative clicks along with an almost playful energy as Muchietti teases out the horror. But this is the kind of thriller that is most effective, and scary, only as we are fed fleeting glimpses of the creature. In the last act, as the ghoul is fully revealed in all her hideous glory, the suspense drains from the narrative. You get the sense that the filmmakers are working overtime to show off Mama as a meticulously crafted special effect. And as the plot paints itself into a diabolical corner, a live action thriller congeals into another movie altogether, a Gothic showpiece of digital craft.”

Vanessa Farquharson of the National Postseemed to agree. “Mama proves to be a great horror film for about half of its running time – the half in which we can’t see who or what this Mama character is.” She took issue with the movie’s finale.

“Without giving it away, there are least seven alternate ways Mama might have climaxed that would’ve been far more satisfying. Instead, audiences are left feeling as though Muschietti opted for the worst possible trajectory in a choose-your-own-adventure novel without realizing he had the power to rewrite it all.”

Mama opens in cinemas Friday.