Guillermo del Toro may be in danger of becoming the next M. Night Shyamalan. In both cases, there was a time when their name on a film was a sign of something special and of high quality. In both cases, things took a downward slide for them somewhere. For Shyamalan, it's become so bad that even when he's just a producer, a trailer can spark unintentional giggles in an audience. (I witnessed this during a trailer for the schlocky-looking Devil.) Now that del Toro has produced the weak Don't Be Afraid of the Dark and followed it with Mama, he needs to start being more careful what he attaches his name to.
To be fair, Mama isn't a disaster. It's a wonderfully creepy premise, and the film does serve up a handful of very well conceived sequences that culminate in fun scares. But the film makes more wrong turns than right. The title creature is given too much power, and ultimately too corporeal a form; it strains credibility that she kills so many side characters instantly, but is not so immediately brutal with the main characters. (There's some lip service paid to the girls asking that they be spared, but I think this is a scene we really needed to see.)
The side characters are a generally foolish lot, even by horror standards. There's a creepy old lady who professes her lack of belief in the otherworldly, before launching into a convenient bit of exposition explaining what's going on. There's a stupid doctor who, suspecting the supernatural element of the situation, decides he must do his investigating in the black of night. There's a cartoonishly flat relative vying for custody of the children; I'm not likely spoiling anything to say what happens to her isn't much of a surprise.
The creature design itself is a mixed bag. Mama moves in wonderfully effective, creepy ways -- crab-walking in an homage to The Exorcist, moving through solid objects in ways that leave pieces of her figure creepily exposed, gliding slowly sometimes and moving too fast for the eye to follow at others. But the creature herself is pretty hokey, or at least is revealed to be so when you see far too much of her in the final act of the movie.
Still, the core cast adds a lot to the movie. The two young girls are convincingly earnest in playing out several horror tropes. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau brings some of his Game of Thrones charm to mix -- and also enjoys a brief second role as a twin brother responsible for setting the whole scenario in motion.
But the real star is Jessica Chastain. She plays a young goth(ish) woman, bass player in a garage band, and decidedly non-maternal. Her character is thrust into this situation just because of who she happens to be dating. I just last week saw Chastain's performance in Zero Dark Thirty, and oddly enough it was this performance that really impressed me. She's received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for that other role (and won the Golden Globe for it), but I noted in my review that almost everyone in Zero Dark Thirty seemed very chameleon-like in their roles. Jessica Chastain simply didn't seem like she was "acting" in that movie, and her skill was thus easy to overlook. Her character here in Mama is so different, and her performance so utterly unlike that in Zero Dark Thirty, that it made me retroactively appreciate more just what a worthy candidate for the Oscar she really is.
Mama isn't a total loss of a movie, but it's certainly not one to rush out to the theater to see. Maybe put it in your Netflix queue if you're a horror fan, but skip it altogether if you're not. I'd rate it a C- (and probably a low one at that).
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