Ma – a movie review (spoilers, duh.)
Ma was a movie that I felt got a lot of advertisement and then radio silence after it came out. The movie is a Blumhouse production, so of course, it is supposed to edgy, well-written, and surprising (and have a horrible ending). Overall the cinematography is very well done. The actors (outside of Octavia Spencer) were okay, not spectacular and not horrible. I was excited to watch this film and see Ms. Spencer is a new genre. My biggest critique of this movie would be the last third of the movie is incredibly rushed. The random/surprise daughter, the high school reunion, hit and run, the fire is all rushed. The whole small town thing where the kids go to the same school as their parents did and all still live and work in the same town is the only way this movie works.
So, in a nutshell, Sue Ann (Ma) was sexually harassed/assaulted in high school by some jerks. The kids in the movie are the children of those jerks. She tries to relive her high school experience and get revenge on the jerks by befriending and attempting to manipulate their children. She has a daughter that ends up being a “surprise” to the audience who is definitely a victim of Factitious Disorder imposed on another. That daughter finally decides to get out of her mother’s grasp at the perfect moment in the movie and ends up saving the kids that were trapped in the basement. Ma gets stabbed, trapped in the fire, somehow walks through the fire and goes to bed in flames next to the man she killed (her high school love interest who orchestrated the assault/harassment).
Alright, the movie could have done SO MUCH MORE. I read somewhere that move was rewritten to expand on Ma’s character and give her more of a backstory. I think they could have done more and really used their runtime to their benefit. It felt like someone came up and with a “cool story” but could not follow through and maybe could have used the help some other seasoned writers. They clearly filmed a different version of the movie and then cut things out and put it all back together, but I didn’t work.
Some moments:
- One of the guys gives Ma a Love It or List It lesson on how she can upgrade her basement. She responds with a version of “do you got McDonald’s movie?” and the guy gets ALL up in her face pretty saying, “don’t you wanna be cool Ma?” To which, I knew this had to be some small town nonsense because this White boy must have lost his mind getting in a Black woman’s face like that.
Her response is to pull out a gun and make him take all of his clothes off. Weird. Then she says, “milk did that body good.” Also, weird. THEN she says she’s just kidding and the gun does not even work and makes some joke like “What ya’ll think I’m Madea?!” …..sigh.
The gun NEVER comes back up in the film, which is BS. The rule in any movie is that when a gun is shown, it will be used. This could have come up at any point during the last 10 minutes in the movie when the kids were trapped and tied up in the basement. It doesn’t. Instead, a conveniently lit candle gets knocked over and starts a house fire. LAZY.
- We find out later that the Black girl in the wheelchair who we saw for 2 minutes in the beginning of the movie is the daughter of Ma. Her name is Genie … a nod to the Genie was studied by psychologists in the 50s? Maybe. But, it was severely underdeveloped, random, and rushed. She bops Ma in the head with a skillet, Ma falls down the stairs, and Genie locks the door. This moment, of course, would have been much better if we had actually invested in and cared about Genie’s character. Alas, they didn’t and we don’t.
- At the end of the movie, Ma calls the main girl a coward and says she’s like her mother. The main girl promptly picks up a knife (NOT THE GUN) and stabs Ma while yelling, “I’m NOTHING like my mother,” umm well damn. Your mom is only standing right there, but whatever.
- There’s a scene in the movie where Ma’s goes to get more tranquilizer from the vet office she works at and we see she killed her boss and put her in a cage. Again, random, rushed, out of nowhere. The important detail that is clearly overlooked here is that Ma’s hand is clearly burned in this shot. Which makes NO SENSE because the fire had not yet happened when they show us this scene. Obviously, she was supposed to make it out of the fire and there would be more scenes before the movie ended. I guess the editors thought we would not notice…or they did not notice.
- One thing that I did like was how they addressed Ma’s relationship with her blackness. She acted weird toward the only other Black main character in the movie. I was not quite sure where they were going with it, is a small town thing? Is this part of her character? Is it why she hides her daughter? At the end of the movie, she poses all of the knocked out/drugged up kids for a photo that she wanted to re-create for her “yearbook.” She put a hot iron to the chest of the ‘hot dude,’ sewed the mouth closed of the ‘loudmouth,’ and painted the Black guy (Chaz’s) face white and says, “there’s only room for one of us.” This trope is unfortunately very common and I liked that they included it in the movie. Usually, there is only one person of color in white friend groups and there can be some territorial issues for POC’s who are not secure in themselves and feel threatened by not being the only one.
Honestly, I think I would watch this movie if they released a different version of it on DVD/internet. Octavia Spencer deserved better, and I lost a couple of hours of my life that I can not get back.
Eh.