Teens get more than they bargained for from Octavia Spencer
When Blumhouse gets together with the director of The Help and Octavia Spencer gets on board, audiences better buckle up. With Ma, this crew has reinvented the high school horror genre in splendid and terrifying form.
Set in a small, but not too-small, town, Ma tells the story of a lonely woman desperately trying to connect with some local teens, although her motives become more twisted as the story develops. What starts off as a seemingly well-meaning adult breaking liquor laws to encourage teenage binge drinking falls off the rails, but it takes a while.
Ma tells the audience where it’s going long before it gets there. After watching the opening credits, the film appears to be about Maggie (Diana Silvers from Booksmart), a young woman who just moved to town with her mother Erica (Juliette Lewis). It’s a homecoming for mom, who escaped only to end up back in her hometown having failed to realize her dreams.
Maggie falls in with some cool kids, and while some movies would make this the source of the horror, Ma creates a tight little group of friends who just want to have fun. They meet Sue Ann (Spencer) outside a liquor store walking her dog. After some coaxing she helps the group out, allowing them to drink out at the rock pile in peace.
Before long Ma, as Sue Ann likes to be called, invites everyone back to her house to drink in her basement, a refuge from cops and parents. It’s all too good to be true, but before long it’s the party destination in town.
Along the way, flashbacks reveal the shared past of Sue Ann, Erica, and others who knew each other in high school, though something went terribly wrong. It becomes clear that the next generation is standing in for their parents, first as a way to relive a better version of a bitter past, but eventually as something more nefarious.
While the cast is strong across the board, Ma lives and dies with Spencer, who delivers a performance that dips into the full gamut from sympathy to antipathy. We can guess that she’s nuts, but the road she took to get there is hard won.
There are a couple of jump scares in Ma, but most of the horror comes from the sense of doom that Sue Ann creates with her obsession and violent temper. By movie’s end, everyone involved in this story will never forget their interaction with Ma.