Mom’s the word in frights

But this film has too many gimmicks

Mama

Starring: Jessica Chastain, Nickolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Charpentier, Isabelle Nelisse, Daniel Kash Directed by: Andres Muschietti

Running time: 100 minutes Advisory: frightening scenes, violence Playing at: Angrignon, Banque Scotia, Colossus, Côte des Neiges, Kirkland, Lacordaire, Marché Central, Sources, Sphèretech,

Taschereau cinemas

The following list of tips is aimed at helping mothers, fathers and babysitters avoid demonic possession, premature mutilation and all varieties of body envelope violation.

Number one: When the kids start climbing the wall like a spider, run for your life. Chances are, nothing good will come of the child’s acrobatics.

Number two: When trying to retrain a wild child raised by a rogue demon, try soft love, then tough love. And if that doesn’t work, run for your life.

Number three: When facing off against a spectral psycho with a maternity fetish, tell her that her newborn baby’s corpse is beautiful. Smile. Then scram!

A little bit Exorcist and a little bit Others, Mama knows how terrifying children can be and ramps up every creep factor with the backstory for young Victoria and Lilly.

Orphaned in the wake of the financial crisis after their father flies into a homicidal rage and kills their mother, Lilly and Victoria find themselves in a cottage far outside of town. They have no one but miraculously they survive for five years in the wilderness by themselves. Or so it seems to the outside world.

We know better because director Andres Muschietti and producer Guillermo Del Toro show us a series of stick drawings on the wallpaper created in crayon. We see the forms of two young girls eating cherries, flying in the air and vomiting what looks like blood.

We also see a third form — a floating adult figure with long hair: Mama.

Only the girls can see Mama, at least at the beginning.

Once they are discovered and treated for psychological disorders, they move in with their uncle Lucas (Nickolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain), who feel they may be taking on more than they can chew as firsttime parents.

For Lucas and Annabel, the addition of Victoria and Lilly presents several challenges but they seem to cope — one crisis at a time — until Lucas has his first encounter with Mama, and ends up falling down the stairs.

Now alone with the kids, Annabel is feeling entirely out of her element. She’s not the mothering type: She’s a Goth bass player who wears black clothes and sports a shiny black manicure.

She thinks the girls are high maintenance drama queens, but once she gets a sense she’s sharing her caregiving duties with an unseen force she cranks up her protective urges.

Rival mother figures always create great theatrics (think Sigourney and the Alien), and Chastain has the right blend of maternal softness and personal spunk to make us root for her brassy brand of caregiving.

Filling out the other side of the scorecard is Mama, an unattractive and entirely hollow paranormal apparition who wants to possess the young girls as her own, in all the wrong ways. Of course, thanks to the earnest town librarian who wears glasses and trembles, we also learn Mama was once a mental patient who ran away from the hospital.

Mama has moments that can go either way, depending on your fear threshold. The real attraction is the emotional side of the story, where we get to watch Chastain grow into a rabidly protective parent while the kids struggle over who makes the better mom: Annabel or Mama.

With nods to everything from Hitchcock to Rosemary’s Baby, Mama proves a successful frightfest, but one gets the feeling this movie could have been even creepier with a little more dramatic engagement and a few less special effects.