Ma (2019) [Blu-ray]
Horror | Thriller

Tagline: Welcome to Ma's

Oscar winner Octavia Spencer stars as Sue Ann, a loner who keeps to herself in her quiet Ohio town. One day, she is asked by Maggie, a new teenager in town (Diana Silvers, Glass), to buy some booze for her and her friends, and Sue Ann sees the chance to make some unsuspecting, if younger, friends of her own. She offers the kids the chance to avoid drinking and driving by hanging out in the basement of her home. But there are some house rules: One of the kids has to stay sober. Dont curse. Never go upstairs. And call her "Ma." But as Mas hospitality starts to curdle into obsession, what began as a teenage dream turns into a terrorizing nightmare, and Ma's place goes from the best place in town to the worst place on earth.

Storyline: In this new psychological horror-thriller from Tate Taylor and Blumhouse, a lonely woman befriends a group of teenagers and decides to let them party at her house. Just when the kids think their luck couldn't get any better, things start happening that make them question the intention of their crazy host.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Martin Liebman, August 22, 2019 Oscar winner Octavia Spencer turns in the most complex performance of her career in Director Tate Taylor's (The Girl on the Train) Ma, the story of a wounded soul carrying deeply seeded and painfully weighty baggage that is yearning to be exorcised through violence. The film takes the Horror genre through somewhat uncharted paces, exploring a scarred figure from the outside in and eventually pushing back out, removing a pleasant façade in favor of a fully different face of fear. It's approachable even in its complexity and blends pure entertainment value with well designed character depth, capped by performance intensity. It's one of the better films of 2019.

Erica Thompson (Juliette Lewis) and her daughter Maggie (Diana Silvers) are moving back to the small Ohio town where Erica grew up; her marriage has failed and it's time for the family to get a fresh, if not familiar, start on the road to recovery. Erica makes several quick friends, including a boy named Andy (Corey Fogelmanis) who is attracted to her, and she to he. One day, the group solicits help in buying alcohol and comes across a kindly middle aged woman named Sue Ann (Octavia Spencer) who not only buys the booze but eventually befriends the teens and supplies her basement as the designated party area for the the group, whose number quickly swells when word spreads of Sue Ann's, whom the teens call Ma, generous, and illegal, hospitality. But little does the group know that Ma harbors a deep resentment and clings to a number of emotional scars from her own high school days, centered around a relationship with Andy's father Ben (Luke Evans), that may spell far more trouble than a brush with the law for those she has taken under her wing and into her basement.

Movie titles don't come much shorter, and neither do killers come much more frightening, frightening not because of a mask and intimidating posture but because of the subtlety of the evil, the mask of real life and a smile hiding the festering wounds and the want for revenge. Ma tells a curiously devilish story centered around a curiously devilish character, a woman who is anything but the face of evil but whose soul has transformed over the years into one thirsty for blood, for finding a place in the world by removing those things that have hurt her from it. It is more than 30 minutes before the movie begins to explore, ever so briefly, why it is Sue Ann hosts the partiers and details the past pains that have shaped her character. It's not particularly groundbreaking stuff, but where the movie succeeds is in its slow-burn character turn, as Sue Ann lures her prey and as the audience slowly comes to understand what drives her deeply hidden but existentially evident bloodlust.

Spencer is wonderful in the lead role, turning on an everywoman charm who by all appearances is someone anyone would want in their lives, and not just because she plays the role of great liquor facilitator. She's generous, kind, peppy, and Spencer inhabits these characteristics with an easy come charm evident from the outset. But she's also more than capable of hinting at who she is beyond the façade, dropping a smile or fixing a gaze at just the right moment to maintain the illusion but sell the audience on what's brewing underneath. The characters are none the wiser, of course, blinded by their own greed for taking full advantage, and then some, of her hospitality and condoning of their behavior. As the frivolity and fun party beats eventually turn to cold-blooded violence, the movie proves as intoxicatingly mismatched as Spencer's character. Without delving into spoiler territory, the film does not take any traditional Horror beats, including who lives and who dies, which is one of its greatest qualities; it absolutely turns the genre on its head, building one of the most simple and human but highly effective genre films to come around in some time.

Spencer previously worked with Tate on The Help, the film for which she won her Oscar. Ma is an entirely different kind of film with its own challenges and a unique focus on personal deterioration born of a singular moment of humiliation. It's eerily complex and effectively engrossing, even if it takes its time building and peering into its title character. It's a refreshing rebrand of the Horror genre, a more open yet more involved and layered story of deeply rooted interior torture that begs to be loosed on the world. Universal's Blu-ray is very well rounded, delivering high-end video and audio presentations and a fair little sprinkling of extra content. Highly recommended.

[CSW] -2.3- To label Ma a horror movie is inaccurate. It's more a thriller revenge plot, with mild psychological horror undertones. Octavia Spencer is a great fit for the titular character, while other actors aren't too impressive. There are some plot twists which add to the interest of the plot, but overall this was not a very engaging film. I felt it relied too heavily on the trendy tropes of the modern horror film, which I can't get into without spoiling. If you watch Ma, you likely won't regret it, but at the same time it's toeing the line between "Eh, give it a try" and "Not worth your time."
[V4.5-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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