Ma (2019)

JUNE 5, 2019

GENRE: REVENGE, THRILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

First Brightburn, and now Ma - I am really getting tired of trailers that not only give away the best parts, but also focus heavily on things that are meant to be reveals in the narrative itself. To be fair, a couple (literally, two) of Ma's surprises were discovered in the film as opposed to its marketing, but I still spent far too much of my time being ahead of the characters, making it hard to get sucked into the story. And that's kind of a problem for a thriller; these movies are largely designed to only really work once, and yet it felt like I was already on my second viewing since I had already seen Ma do most of the crazy things she does in its 95 or so minutes.

Because, alas, this is not a movie about Octavia Spencer wiping out a group of partying kids like some kind of unmasked Jason Voorhees. There's a bit of a body count, though the R rating mostly comes from the language as opposed to violence (it never gets more extreme than the jogger being run over, which - broken record time - was in the trailer), with one curious exception that the MPAA didn't even really mention. The film's R rating was chalked up to "violent/disturbing material, language throughout, sexual content, and for teen drug and alcohol use", and it should be noted that "sexual content" usually means people discussing sex or maybe implying it, i.e. something that even a PG-13 could have. But one thing a PG-13 definitely can't have is a shot of a male penis, which this offers courtesy of Luke Evans, whose character is Ma's real target.

See, what this movie really is is one of those "outcast gets revenge on classmates who humiliated her" films, albeit a curiously structured one where it takes nearly an hour for the screenplay to inform us just exactly what happened all those years ago, unlike the similar movies that explain it up front before flashing forward. It's a really horrible prank along the lines of Terror Train (albeit without the corpse; young Ma, really named Sue Ann, was once tricked into performing a sex act on what she thought was her crush but was actually his buddy), but the long build up to it suggests it will twist our perspective and have us rooting for Ma. That is certainly not the case, and since her revenge plot makes little sense, it's hard to see the correlation when the reveal finally happens. The guy that she actually performed on isn't even mentioned again, for starters, even though that'd be an easy target (not to mention someone who could pepper in a little action early on). Weirder still, Evans' high school girlfriend, who was of course in on the prank, is still around in the present (played by Missi Pyle as an adult), but when Ma goes after her she chalks it up to defending Juliette Lewis' character, who Pyle had mocked in the present for having to move back home after a messy divorce. So was Lewis's younger self Sue Ann's only friend or something? Nope, we barely see her in the past and later on Ma seems to consider her part the same group of oppressors anyway.

Further, it makes me wonder why the filmmakers felt the need to wait so long to show it; in fact they actually build up to it with a series of flashbacks of young Sue Ann first catching the guy's eye, going to a party with him, etc. By the time we see what exactly happened, we've already learned in the present that Sue Ann is an outcast, has trouble making friends, and has some curious views on teenaged sex, so not only is the payoff kind of anticlimactic, but the movie would have worked better as a whole by seeing this incident up front and letting us sympathize with her a little and even wanting to see her get revenge only for her to take it too far and shift our allegiance. Now it occurs after it's fully established that she's crazy, which is obviously too late for us to start feeling bad for her. It'd be like waiting until Friday the 13th Part 4 to tell us Jason was a little boy who drowned.

Another wonky creative decision concerns the heroine, Maggie (Diana Silvers, one of the cheerleaders in Glass), whose is Lewis' character's daughter. She is new in town and has no friends, and on her first day at school she is eating her packed lunch in the library by herself when a girl named Haley storms in out of nowhere, introduces herself, and puts her number into Maggie's phone, and then the following day invites her to join them for some drinking. It's such a strange way for Maggie to make friends that I thought for sure she - like Sue Ann - was being tricked into doing something embarrassing by people who were only pretending to like her, and thus parallel Ma's story. Hell, there's even a moment where she tells Ma "I'm stronger than you!" or something to that effect, which practically seems left over from a draft of the script where that was indeed the case.

But no, Haley and the others are legit friends to the end, and furthermore Ma is barely interested in her at all, so I had to wonder why the movie even bothered kicking off with her arrival in town since her "new kid" status has no bearing on anything beyond the aforementioned bit about Pyle throwing shade at Lewis for moving back home. Maggie's irrelevance to the majority of the plot is really hammered home with a clumsy runner about Ma apparently taking their jewelry, which kicks off when a girl we've never seen before runs over to Maggie and Haley in the hallway to tell them about her birthday plans and Maggie zeroes in on her new bracelet. Maggie admires it and we get a lengthy closeup of it, and if you've seen a single movie before you'd know that this means later on Maggie will find that very same bracelet in Ma's basement or something, suggesting something happened to the girl. But when the bracelet does come back later, Maggie's not even the one who notices it - Haley does, even though she wasn't the one that was so fixated on it earlier. As for the bracelet's owner? Who knows, they never mention her again.

It's the sort of thing that had me wondering if the movie was re-edited and re-arranged from an earlier cut. Throughout the movie, the kids (not just Maggie) are put off by something weird Ma does, only to seemingly forget about it the next day and hang out with her again. Even after Haley broadcasts "everyone block Ma's number, she's crazy!" to all of her friends (including Ma! Learn how to hide your posts from specific people, Haley!) they all seem fine with each other a day or two later, as if the scenes weren't presented in their intended order. There are also baffling things like Ma using a dog's blood for a transfusion on someone she just kills a few moments later anyway - why? That, along with the go-nowhere subplots about the jewelry (the way the trailer cuts that stuff together actually works better, ironically enough) and Maggie's similarly erratic relationship with her mother makes me wonder if there wasn't some reshaping or a much longer cut that would have shown more naturally why these folks can't seem to make up their minds about anything.

Still, Spencer's performance keeps it watchable, even entertaining at its best. Since I didn't know the trailer had shown me so much until it was over, I was never quite sure what she'd be doing next, and she doesn't even really try to hide her "off"-ness from the kids; the second time they visit she holds one of them at gunpoint and makes him strip (something they all write off as a joke later even though, uh, it's the same sort of sexually driven trauma she was so broken up about, directed at someone who had nothing to do with it - weird decision #23). I also loved the scenes where she was at work as a veterinarian, because she was clearly terrible at her job and constantly berated by her boss, played by the great Allison Janney - even though I came for a horror movie, I probably would have walked out happier if it was just a workplace comedy about these two trying to keep a small town animal clinic afloat despite hating each other. There's also a hilarious bit where Ma is getting a pedicure and starts cussing on the phone, drawing the ire of an old lady next to her - I could have watched the two of them bicker for 90 minutes, easily.

But alas, with so few thrills, the janky pacing, and missed opportunities, it's hard to say I walked out a big fan of what I DID see. It was watchable for sure; the climax was reasonably suspenseful, and the kids were thankfully all likable (even Haley, introduced as a kind of "pretty popular girl" type, is caring about her friends and never seen being mean to anyone), so it's not a "bad movie" in the traditional sense. But it was like the makers couldn't decide if it was a trashy B movie about a psycho or a serious thriller about the long-term effects of adolescent trauma (something the company's The Gift did so quite wonderfully a few years back), and ended up somewhere in the middle, underwhelming on both fronts. Here's hoping the Blu-ray has a longer cut or at least a wealth of deleted scenes that can rectify one or both problems, though after a few years I wouldn't get my hopes up as Blumhouse stuff almost never gets extended versions (Truth or Dare is the only exception that comes to mind) and even when they HAVE deleted scenes they're often missing ones we know about (i.e. Halloween and its original ending). What you see is what you get, and while that's often good enough, here I needed a little more.

What say you?

1 comment:

  1. You voice so many of my thoughts on this film. Something about the jumbled, non-progressing storyline and erratic "one step forward, two steps back" character development makes me feel that they completed filming and then tried to re-engineer the story in the editing bay. And the oddly irrelevant addition of her Munchausen-by-Proxy daughter left me wondering just how many hands contributed to the final script. It is terribly disjointed. The whole thing just felt underdeveloped. The film failed to demonstrate an instigating trauma sufficient to turn the main character into a mass murderer, and it failed to show that she was predisposed to psychosis for any reason before the episode in the janitor's closet, and then it failed to show us what finally triggered her psychotic break in the present. Octavia Spencer painted a sympathetic character throughout most of the film, but the script does not give her enough to work with. Nothing that made it onscreen justifies the character's actions. I was just left wanting MORE. More psychosis, more character development, and more bloodshed. This felt like one of those uninspired gialli where they trot out some random background character at the end and explain their apparent mania as wholly unrelated to anything previously mentioned anywhere in the film. "Oh, he developed an unnatural fear of water after contracting syphilis in Greece twenty years ago, so he started killing prostitutes working near the lake after he was splashed by an inconsiderate driver six months ago."

    And, by the way, that dog blood transfusion would have been a horrible way to go. He most likely would have had an almost immediate acute hemolytic reaction and massive blood clots throughout his system. My money would be on clots in his lungs and brain and a series of strokes resulting in a truly terrible death.

    What a shame that Octavia Spencer's first lead role was in this half-baked film.

    ReplyDelete

Movie & TV Show Preview Widget

Google