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film reviews, horror films, horror flicks, horror movies, Jessica Chastain, Mama, movie, movie reviews, movies, scary movies, suspense
I’ve doing this blog for nearly a year and a half, and I noticed I haven’t done a movie review yet. I’ve done book reviews and discussed my favorite TV shows. So I guess I better add movies to the list, no? 🙂
Click here for the film’s IMDB page
Since Halloween is upon us, I arranged my Netflix queue so I would get the horror flick, “Mama” over the weekend rather. Usually I don’t watch horror because I can’t handle gore. Luckily there was none of that here, which made the movie easy to watch.
There were a lot of jumping-out-of-your-seat, blink-and-you-miss-it, watching-behind-the-main-character moments in this film. The special effects used to create Mama were creepy as well as excellent. There’s a lot of chilling knocks and tapping sounds, and some good dream sequences explaining the story.
I thought Jessica Chastain was great as she usually is. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was also good, though I was really thrown off in the beginning over which character he was playing (turns out he was playing both the father and the uncle to the two young girls). But the actresses who portrayed the young girls, Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse, were the highlight. I didn’t feel as though neither of them failed to bring their characters to life, and if had that happened, this movie wouldn’t have succeeded.
I felt there were too many dark scenes here and I couldn’t understand why the uncle would go to the log cabin alone at night without a single flashlight. Worst of all, there were a lot of plot holes. I felt the back story which explained how the girls ended up in the cabin as toddlers was overdeveloped because I kept wondering what connection their malicious father had to Mama. And there were other issues that weren’t further developed or explained. They don’t ruin the storyline altogether, but I was left saying, “what, huh?!”
I had trouble with the ending. It made sense, it fit with the story and Mama and all…but I felt so unsettled about it. I won’t say how it goes, but it involves one of the girls and its just…you know, not right, even though it is right from a storytelling point of view, and also for the movie’s genre. If you choose to see this film, you’ll get what I mean.
Overall, not bad of a movie. The acting was fantastic, the effects were wonderful, and there were moments that made me cringe with suspense. It had its flaws which luckily didn’t overwhelm the whole movie. So I will give Mama 3.5 out of 5 stars. Yes, I know that .5 may not be acceptable for some, but I can’t give this 4 stars because of the ending. But I also feel it doesn’t deserve a 3 star. So 3.5 it is! 😛
Megan Cashman 