Ma

Grade: C

We are in the season of the summer blockbuster throwaway movie. You’re not likely to find the best of the year in June/July/August. In my 19 years of writing about movies, I have found that it’s often the worst time of the year. There is a significant amount of fluff particularly from the horror genre during this time. Ma – director Tate Taylor’s (The Help) new Octavia Spencer vehicle – certainly qualifies. It seems aimed at people who don’t question things too much at the movies – like, perhaps, the two blonde millennials sitting right next to me at last night’s showing. Actually, my assigned seat was right next to theirs, but as it was late and a sparsely attended theater, I didn’t want to appear threatening, so I took the next seat over, and left an empty one between us.

Ma opens with a single mother (Juliette Lewis, very effective here – all grown up and playing mothers now) driving her teenage daughter Maggie (a memorable Diana Silvers) to live in Ohio, where the Lewis character grew up and went to school. It doesn’t take long for Maggie to make friends at school, as a handful of kids who always hang out together “adopts” her right away. In an incredible coincidence, these teenagers are all children of people who went to the same school and also hung out together in exactly the same ways back in the day. These people never left town, or didn’t stay gone for too long, and all conceived children within the same 9 month period, so they would all be in the same grade at the same school and happen to befriend each other just like their parents. Wow! What are the odds? This forced plot point comes into play later.

One of the kids has access to a van belonging to his dad’s security company, and has free reign to drive a handful of friends around town on weekend nights so they can drink and vape. Enter Octavia Spencer as the title character, who becomes an enabler of these children. She opens up the basement of her house off a distant country road, so they can party. Over time, she cleans up and decorates the basement, word spreads, and Friday nights at Ma’s becomes a regular thing for teenagers from all over town.

She only has one rule: don’t go upstairs. No points for guessing whether that happens. Meanwhile, Ma looks at everyone’s Facebook/Instagram profiles, somehow gets all their numbers, and blows their phones up with texts and videos, mostly about how she can’t wait to see them this weekend, or how it’s 5:00 somewhere, so why wait for the weekend. Occasionally, jewelry belonging to some female characters goes missing and ends up on Ma’s person, and she seems to take it very personally if no one shows up for a while, or they go too long without responding.

Ma (the movie) has an intriguing premise and backstory, but is misguided, with the focus being on the least interesting characters. It is bottom-heavy. Everything happens in bursts in the hasty final act. When the body count begins, the first offing happens in public in broad daylight, and then is completely forgotten about with no further investigation. The final moment could have been a brilliantly macabre bittersweet beat, but as is, feels too meticulously choreographed and fake. Cheap jump scares are just that. Octavia Spencer is a gifted actress, but I don’t think scary is in her emotional vocabulary. Any creepy moments from her are owed more to contrived camera angles or the score going haywire. She is at her best when she breaks down and shows us Ma’s tortured, sad, vulnerable side. I wanted more of that, and less from the kids’ POV. Other performances shine. McKaley Miller is appropriately and endearingly annoying as one of the friends. It was nice to see Allison Janney, but she was wasted. With such a small role, with scenes probably all filmed on the same day, you wonder why they didn’t get some upcoming no-namer who wouldn’t have cost as much.

There is something beneath Ma that could have made a more substantive cinematic experience, but is lost in an uninspired plot-holey execution. The trailer is fun to see. It led me down some wrong paths, and made me make assumptions which turned out to be wrong. And it can make for a fun evening out with friends, and will surely inspire post-movie discussions at Waffle House or over ice cream. Maybe that’s the point.

Grade: C