Ma *** (2019, Octavia Spencer, Diana Silvers, Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans) – Movie Review

Octavia Spencer stars in Ma (2019) as a lonely woman called Sue Ann, aka Ma of course, who befriends a group of typically dumb American film teenagers looking for a good time and lets them drink and party in the basement of her house.

Diana Silvers plays the film’s heroine, teenager Maggie, who has moved back to town where she is living with her waitress mom Erica (Juliette Lewis). Both of these characters mean well, but it isn’t long before we realise that Sue Ann doesn’t mean well at all. In fact she is mean – and much, much worse. But then, she has her reasons.

What starts very satisfactorily as a psychological revenge thriller turns around two thirds of the way into a horror thriller and loses all subtlety and much credibility, though arguably it makes up for that in a fast moving series of acceptable shocks and scares.

The problem is that director Tate Taylor and writer Scotty Landes are working for Blumhouse, so they have to deliver a high school horror movie, with lots of ‘what the hell?’ moments. Teen audiences might find the start of the film a bit slow going but actually this is all the movie’s good stuff. Octavia Spencer does a grand job, starting by pulling you in to her side by acting vulnerable and needy, and then going full on in a tour de force, though in later stages of the film you wonder if this is really the kind of classy work her career needs.

Scotty Landes could have drawn out the early stages of the film much longer, with all the teasing ‘what’s Ma up to?’ stuff engrossing the attention. When we know what she’s up to, the film is less interesting. And then there is the problem of trying to explain why the kids would still have anything to do with the demented old bat, once they realise she is a demented old bat. This is the same problem the similar Greta (2018) has.

It’s good to have a middle aged actress in the star role and at the centre of things. And the other two main characters are female, another middle aged actress and the 21-year-old Diana Silvers. It could feel women dominated but it doesn’t. Admittedly men are the villains, especially Ben, an unforgiving and unforgiven role played by Luke Evans.

Corey Fogelmanis and Gianni Paolo draw the short straw as the eye candy, and Missi Pyle and Allison Janney have rotten roles as Ben’s mistress Mercedes and Sue Ann’s vet surgery boss Doctor Brooks. But never mind, these side characters don’t have to be complex.

Sue Ann’s character is pretty complex and complicated, a bit conflicted, but utterly and for ever damaged and damaging. She is a close relative of Kathy Bates’s Annie Wilkes in Misery (1990) and Isabelle Huppert’s Greta Hideg in Greta (2018). Ma seems to owe a great deal of debt to Misery and Greta, as well as to Us (2019), though it was probably written ages before Greta and Us were released. It remains fresh and its own thing though.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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