Small-town horror with a misogynistic streak
Dir Tate Taylor
Starring Octavia Spencer, Juliette Lewis, Diana Silvers, Allison Janney, Luke Evans, Missi Pyle, Mckaley Miller
If you didn’t know Ma was a horror film, you’d be puzzled, to say the least, by the developments of the first half, which contain nothing horrific – only a lot of odd, off, implausible human behaviour that no other explanation could redeem.
The title character, a small-town veterinary aide played by Octavia Spencer, is introduced as she walks her dog outside a liquor store. A gang of under-age teens lurking in a van want her to buy alcohol for them, having tried several grumpy locals already. She shoos them off at first, then relents, remembering her own good old days getting wasted at a rock pile on the fringes of town. But then she anonymously tips the police off, and a cop, played by the film’s director, Tate Taylor, shows up to send them packing.
What was in all this for Ma – or Sue Ann, as she’s more properly known, before being given that overfamiliar nickname? She has a maniacal master plan, even if it’s one seemingly hatched in the blink of an eye, among a network of characters she’s only just met, despite turning out to be historically obsessed with everyone in town. One person is new: after years living elsewhere, Maggie (Diana Silvers) has just transferred to the local school that her single mother (Juliette Lewis), along with every
adult of that age in this one-horse backwater, used to attend.
Maggie and her friends soon gain a drinking hideout – Ma’s basement – and while the whole arrangement is bizarre, as is Ma’s tendency to stroke the 16-year-old boys lasciviously and make them strip at gunpoint, they go along with everything, because they’re just dumb kids, and have no idea what their parents did to Sue Ann when she was their exact age.
Taylor directed Spencer to her Oscar for The Help (2011), where her character’s revenge on racist socialites involved a chocolate pie laced with her own faeces. Ma steps things up: we’re not dealing with Oscar bait here, so she can give these kids a more violent dose of their own medicine. But her actual instruments of revenge, calculated as they might be to lure in horror audiences with the promise of Sawstyle retribution, are eccentric failures.
It’s an odd project for Taylor, who has no feel for a softly-softly shocker. Written and directed by men, the film repeats The Help’s cartoonish streak of misogyny, safe in the knowledge that it has Strong Female Characters: not just Spencer’s deranged and vindictive loner – how progressive! – but Lewis’s valiantly played variation on the struggling, waitressing-for-tips mom who became a film cliché in about 1974. The midnight-movie, exploitationsavvy version of this film, with Spencer chewing up the scenery like nobody’s business, might have been a camp classic. But Taylor’s version is too timid to thrill and too daft to upset anyone.