Rising Star: Jessica Chastain

Around 5 years ago, Spanish director Andrés Muschietti released a short film entitled Mamá, in which two young girls are pursued through a dark house by a demonic mother figure. At less than three minutes long, the short is snappy, horrifying, and crackles with an energy rarely found in horror films; Muschietti took a scalpel to the genre, leaving it with only the bare bones of a psychological horror flick. This restraint gave the film its tense atmosphere, and unfortunately drew it to the attention of Guillermo del Toro, who has now added it to his growing rostra of films labelled ‘Guillermo del Toro Presents…’. Del Toro has taken the premise of the short, and stretched it out over 100 minutes, transforming the elegant skeleton of Muschietti’s original into a bloated, sagging cadaver, buckling under the weight of clichés contained within.

In the original we have no context – we don’t know who, or indeed what Mama is – whereas this edition props itself up with a backstory: in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, an unstable banker kills his business partner and wife, before taking his daughters to a cabin in the woods where he plans to shoot them. Before this can happen, he is killed by a shadowy figure. Skipping forward to the present day, the two girls are found by their uncle (Carter-Waldau), and move in with him and his ‘alternative’ girlfriend (Chastain), who is unready for the responsibilities of child-raising. Shortly after this, they begin to be visited by ‘Mama’, a demonic guardian who terrorises the surrogate parents. I won’t reveal the rest of the story, suffice to say that there is very little that is extraordinary in terms of plot.

The film is supposedly set in an unnamed North American town – filmed in Toronto and Quebec – but I refuse to believe this. I think instead that the film takes place in some kind of alternative universe; a universe in which every conceivable trope in the horror genre goes to die – lights flicker on and off, dimly lit hospital corridors grow mould on their walls, and everyone seems to travel at night, alone, and without any means of contact. Instead of offering us a new take on the supernatural horror film, Muschietti and del Toro have delivered an unimaginative, dull film, in which cheap shocks are delivered as regularly as the chimes of Big Ben.

I do pity Jessica Chastain. Fresh from her disappointment at the 2013 Oscars, in which she missed out on Best Actress for her incredible portrayal of a CIA operative on the hunt for Bin Laden, she now has to appear in a film whose clunky, inorganic dialogue wouldmake even Jack Nicholson seem robotic. Her role in the film, that of an archetypal ‘rebel-chick’ (think black, cropped hair, bass guitars, tattoos, and frequent use of the phrase ‘whatever’) who develops a bond with the orphans, does no justice to her talent. If her recent performances in other films are anything to go by, Chastain is clearly a sublime actress, and although she tries to shine in the role she is ultimately let down by the incredibly poor scriptwriting; seriously, any writer who includes the line ‘do you believe in ghosts?’ in their screenplay deserves to be exiled from Hollywood for disservices to cinema.

One of the only great parts of the film comes in the pint-sized forms of Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse, who play the orphans Victoria and Lilly respectively. From The Omen’s Damien Thorn, to the creepy twins in Kubrick’s The Shining, it is a well-established facthat children are completely terrifying; Charpentier and Nélisse ramp up the chill factor to eleven, giving performances that are both physically and mentally unnerving, showing talent far beyond their years. Had the filmmakers kept this innate creepiness in the girls the focus of the film, rather than fragmenting it with unnecessary side-stories and flimsy character development, it could have become something truly special.

Mama is a perfect example of a good idea poorly executed. It had all the right ingredients to become a chilling, psychological horror – voices coming from the walls, mentally disturbed children, ghostly presences – but chose instead to trade this in for cheap thrills. Go and see the film if you enjoy ‘jump-in-your-seat’ moments and gruesome CGI, just don’t expect to be kept up at night.