Ma

Rating: 3/5

Thanks to Octavia Spencer, Ma is upgraded into a horror movie worth watching.

Maggie Thompson (Diana Silvers) has just been forced to move from California to Ohio with her mom. On her first day of school, she befriends Andy (Corey Fogelmanis), Haley (McKaley Miller), Chaz (Gianni Paolo), and Darrell (Dante Brown). Her four new friends are very much into the party scene, and it is not long before they ask Maggie to try and get alcohol for them.

Outside a convenient store, Maggie is desperately trying to stay on the good side of her new friends, and is asking the people who enter the store to buy them booze. She is seemingly getting nowhere, until she meets a woman named Sue Ann (Octavia Spencer) who agrees to help the teenagers out. At first, they are excited about the prospect of having someone be their alcohol supplier, but Sue Ann, who begins to go only by the name of "Ma", becomes too obsessed with the life of the party.

Going into Ma, I didn't have very high expectations, so I wasn't overly disappointed when the film proved to be fairly unoriginal. It follows the similar archetypes found in any horror movie centered around the illegal escapades of teens, but I wouldn't categorize it as being bad because of that. There are only so many plot lines that can be in existence, so completely critiquing this movie based on the fact that the story is a tad cliche seems a bit unfair. What did make me give this movie a lower rating was the very forced attempt at creating backstory for the characters. A major part of Ma's storyline takes place in flashbacks, and that part seems fine most of the time, but there are small and insignificant moments where the teenaged roles are bringing up painful pieces of their past, in an effort to give their characters depth, but they just fall completely flat. You can see right through the facade of the writers trying to get the audience to care about the people on the screen, but sadly, for any of the teenage cast members, their performances and delivery still make their characters very one dimensional.

What turns Ma into a slightly more than adequate horror movie, is without a doubt Octavia Spencer. Her acting talent is far beyond any of the actors playing the teenagers, and in any scene she's in, she outshine everyone else in the film. There are many parts of Ma where it is clear they were heavily inspired by Misery, and Ma's Annie Wilkes-like tendencies are hard to pull off without over doing it. She's one of those villains that knows how to make the audience fear her, but also see her point of view and almost even take her side at times. Octavia Spencer treads on that border of staying creepy, but not going so far as to make Ma into more of a caricature than a person.

Between the lackluster attempts at a resolution and the general sense of confusion, the ending of Ma was much more disappointing than I would have liked. The build up and exposition was great, and definitely had its scares and enough horror movie tension to make the audience happy, but it all seemed to fall apart a bit in the last twenty minutes. Had the climax of the film been stretched out and had more detail or explanation added, it definitely wouldn't have felt so chaotic and rushed. There was such great potential for this to be a really decent horror movie, but it almost was as if the creators knew they had a great lead, but weren't one-hundred percent sure what to do with the rest of their material.

Here's the thing, even with my comments previously stated above, I would still watch Ma again. Sometimes, when you're in the mood to watch horror movie or a thriller, and you don't want to sit down and watch one that will deeply disturb you, or maybe push the limit too far, Ma is a perfect choice. It definitely has its unsettling moments, but not enough to make you have to psych yourself up to give it another viewing.