Look Ma, no direction
Junk thriller features star turn by Spencer with a finale that veers into hellish territory
Octavia Spencer and Tate Taylor’s Oscar-winning team-up The Help gets a surprising B-movie followup in Ma, which is worlds away from the prestige movie pretensions of their previous collaboration in all but its bad taste.
The production company Blumhouse has made a name for itself as a purveyor of high-concept, low-cost horror movies, and Ma fits the trend. The concept here, though, is essentially that a serious actress like Spencer is putting her quick wit and formidable presence to work for a junky if largely entertaining thriller about a childless matriarch with a house full of secrets.
Spencer plays Sue Ann, later christened Ma, a veterinary technician still living in the sleepy Ohio town where something mysterious and horrible happened to her as a teen.
On one of her daily dog walks, Sue Ann crosses paths with willowy high school student and new kid in town Maggie (Booksmart’s Diana Silvers), whose mother (Juliette Lewis) has moved her back to her old stomping grounds after some dark days in California. Sue Ann becomes a beer-buying guardian to Maggie’s fast group of friends, offering her basement as a safe haven for hangouts and dance parties until Maggie’s
chance encounter with something upstairs begins to unravel her host’s ulterior motives.
Though she’s inconsistently developed at best, Sue Ann is a plum role for an equally gifted comedienne and dramatic actress who’s been languishing in boring supporting parts which trend toward the plucky and matronly.
Spencer plays up the tension between Ma’s cool adult energy as the teens’ endlessly accommodating mother hen and her loneliness and despondency in her everyday life, where she’s bullied by her surly boss (Allison Janney) and dismissed as a loser by old high school pals.
Taylor, a former actor himself, gets grounded performances out of his cast — especially Lewis and Silvers — in the slow-burn first hour, so that he can coast on our goodwill when the film descends into a glib cavalcade of violence.
And descend it does, once Sue Ann’s grand design for the kids is revealed. Ma surely gets points for the blunt efficiency of its sharp left turn into horror, registering at least one genuinely shocking kill. But it loses its sense of tone, pacing and character in the abrupt slide into grand guignol territory, abandoning the earlier attempts to psychologize its sympathetic villain.
We don’t necessarily require our favourite B-movies to be coherent, but Ma isn’t scary enough, funny enough or stylish enough to survive its shoddy last act. One wishes Taylor had just embraced Spencer’s unnerving, unexplained energy and let Ma take Ma wherever she wanted it to go, at her own speed.