Ma is a commentary on the potential consequences of bullying and has several important lessons for teenagers: Don’t drink too much. Don’t trust strangers. And, most importantly, don’t blow a guy in a dark closet unless you’re absolutely certain you know who it is.
More importantly, Ma is basically what you’re left with if you took the basic themes and concepts from Carrie and A Nightmare on Elm Street, but took away the supernatural elements and anything remotely interesting. Although its elevated a bit by a strong cast and a surprising mean streak, it’s ultimately too boring for me to really give a shit.
A bunch of teenagers stand outside of a liquor store and ask adults to buy them booze, ultimately finding a taker in a woman that they come to know as Ma. Not only does Ma buy the booze, she offers her basement to them as a place to hang out and drink. This quickly escalates and Ma’s basement becomes the go-to place for all of the kids in town. However, Ma aint quite right in the head and this is all a plan to get revenge on the kids’ parents for bullying her when she was a teenager.
The biggest issue with Ma is the pacing, as I was bored out of my mind for the first 40 minutes or so. The film takes an incredibly long time to set up a simple premise and, since there have been a million stalker thrillers like this, I’m left impatiently waiting for Ma to just get fucking on with it and go full-on nuts. The premise is really not strong enough for a feature length film and, given the amount of time it spends dragging its feet to make it to feature length, this would have been much better suited as an hour-long episode of Black Mirror or something.
The other big problem is that of character motivation and planning. The movie implies that Ma has wanted to get revenge on the other adults for decades, but the entire film just depends on pure coincidence. She doesn’t plan any of this, she just happened to be walking past the liquor store at the right time. Has she been walking by this liquor store every fucking day, just hoping that this exact scenario would play out? Or was she not planning revenge, but this chance encounter with random kids just put her over the edge? None of this makes any goddam sense. Also, kids, you don’t stand right by the door of the liquor store when asking people to buy booze for you. That’s how you get busted. You need to stand at least 25 yards away while you look for a good mark. Ideally, what you really want is a liquor store near a bus stop. That way, you can sit there and ask people to do it. Fucking kids don’t know how to do anything these days.
Anyway, I’m going to get into spoilers here because Ma’s backstory is kind of ridiculous. As shown in flashbacks, she was a nerdy girl in high school. The basic plot of Carrie happens, except that instead of tricking her to the prom, the cool kids trick her into going to a party and make her believe that she is going to go into a dark closet with the cool guy that she likes and suck his dick. I didn’t write the movie, folks, I’m just reporting on it. Of course, this doesn’t go as Ma had hoped. Instead of being in the closet with the guy she likes, that guy got swapped with some nerdy guy. This entire movie is the consequence of her sucking the wrong dick. That was a sentence that I never thought that I would have to type.
I want to preface this by saying that I completely understand that that is a really mean thing to do and would probably qualify as sexual assault. However, a few problems. First, did the movie need to be that oddly specific? Second, while I’m sure that this event would probably inspire a lot of counseling sessions for Ma, is this really enough to turn somebody into a fucking serial killer decades after it occurred? Finally, you know who I also feel bad for in all of this? The dude that she did blow in the closet. Why? That dude was considered such a fucking loser that blowing him was a scarlet letter from which Ma’s social life never recovered, net even decades later. I couldn’t have gotten laid in high school if I rigged an NSYNC song to play when you unzipped my fly, but I like to think that the girls didn’t fear being permanently ostracized from society if they had slept with me. Somebody needs to check on that guy because I’m pretty sure he is managing a motel somewhere with his mother’s corpse and stabbing chicks in the shower.
The movie does have a couple of bright spots, though. The cast is excellent and Octavia Spencer does what she can to bring some sympathy and believability to the character. Much has been made about how this is her first thriller/horror movie, though people are forgetting that she played a random nurse that gets killed at the beginning of Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2 (do your fucking research, people). It’s also nice to see Juliette Lewis in something and she is great as always. The movie also has some unexpectedly brutal scenes in it. Ma mutilates people in a couple of surprisingly graphic ways and there is a death scene that I don’t think I have ever seen done before (and that’s saying something). I went into this thinking that it was PG-13, but it does earn its R-rating. It just takes a long and silly road to get there.
Cautionary tales about the pitfalls of sucking dick in a dark closet are a dime a dozen these days, but this one didn’t do much for me. Ma isn’t terrible, but it isn’t particularly memorable either. If you’re looking for a horror movie to see in theaters right now, check out Brightburn instead.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(film)#/media/File:Ma_Official_Movie_Poster.jpg
