Mama opens in a suburban street with the camera tracking to a crashed car, with the driver’s door open and the radio announcing that catastrophic economic news has led to a panic in the financial sector, and that executive Jeffrey (Coster-Waldau) is wanted by police for killing his estranged wife and kidnapping his two daughters. Another car accident sees a fleeing Jeffrey and his daughters stranded in a snowy wilderness – non-Danish audiences may well be wondering how safe it is to get into a car with a Dane at this point. The trio happen upon an apparently abandoned cabin, and Jeffrey confidently takes them inside. If horror films have taught us anything, it’s that when you’re lost in the wilderness, an eerie abandoned cabin in the woods may not be the safest bet.
Enter the cabin’s sitting tenant, Mama, a fleetingly seen ghost who oozes out of the walls, kills Jeffrey and raises his daughters as near-feral beasts in the cabin. The siblings are recovered five years later, and Lucas (Jeffrey’s identical twin brother, also played by Coster-Waldau) and his tattooed rock chick girlfriend Annabel (Chastain) take on the task of raising the children as they skitter around on all fours, eat moths and talk in tongues at the walls. Matters are soon complicated by the fact that Mama has followed the family back to civilisation and is none too pleased with the maternal competition.
The secret behind Mama’s attachment to the children is lifted straight from The Woman in Black, the moth motifs reprise elements of The Silence of the Lambs, and the swelling music and familial drama of the climax wouldn’t be out of place in early Spielberg. Surprisingly, however, this patchwork pastiche does work, and director Muschietti maintains a sombre, chilly tone that serves to unify the disparate influences. Annabel is the film’s foundation, and Chastain throws herself into this predictable material convincingly. Her journey to find the Mama in herself might be as conventional as the other spare parts Muschietti has cobbled together, but when they’re delivered as confidently and unassumingly as they are here, it’s hard to ask more from a genre piece.
Mama (15)
Dir: Andy Muschietti; US horror, 2013, 109 mins; Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier, Isabelle Nélisse
Premiered June 20
Playing nationwide
