If Ma’s making eyes at you ... be very afraid
Ma (15) Verdict: Slick psycho thriller ★★★★✩ DIRECTOR Tate Taylor’s 2011 film The Help bagged Octavia Spencer an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. He also cast her as Aunt Honey in the 2014 James Brown biopic Get On Up.
But this time she’s very much centre-stage as the title character, otherwise known as Sue Ann, a small-town veterinary nurse who doesn’t nurse anything quite as devotedly as she does a decades-old grudge against the high school classmates who once made her life a misery.
A series of flashbacks show us that her enduring resentment is well-founded. At one level, Ma — produced by the horrorfilm specialists Blumhouse, but more a psychological thriller than a horror flick — makes a powerful case against the iniquities of bullying. Not that many victims take their revenge with quite as much calculating and pathological cruelty as Sue Ann.
Just to ensure that we don’t feel too sorry for her, Taylor and his co-writer Scotty Landes give her a teenage daughter whom she abuses in a form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — convincing the child that she is ill. Nonetheless, if this film has an overriding message, it’s that adult flaws and foibles are forged in childhood.
Sue Ann’s flaws run deep. We are introduced to her through 16-year-old Maggie (Diana Silvers), newly arrived in town with her single mother, Erica (Juliette Lewis).
Erica grew up locally, so Maggie goes to her mother’s old high school, and is quickly befriended by a group of classmates who loiter outside a mini-mart pleading with grown-ups to buy booze for them. When Maggie approaches Sue Ann, she obliges.
She seems friendly, mumsy even, and the teens begin to call her ‘Ma’. She lends them the basement of her secluded rural home as a place to gather and get drunk well away from disapproving parents and police, and starts partying with them.
Only gradually do they begin to realise what we already know, that her hospitality is all part of a twisted agenda.
Taylor, who gives himself a small part as a cop, keeps all this moving forward very deftly, building the tension and foreboding without sacrificing the story’s credibility. In last month’s release Greta, a strikingly similar film in which Isabelle Huppert played the loopy title character, credibility seeped away until finally there was none left at all.
Taylor can also credit his cast for keeping it real. Spencer is terrific in a role for which she’s not the most obvious fit, and even the small parts are filled by class acts such as Luke Evans and Allison Janney, an Oscar winner herself, but taking merely a cameo here as Sue Ann’s grumpy boss.