A lonely middle-aged woman befriends some teenagers and decides to let them a party in the basement of her home. But there are some house rules: One of the kids has to stay sober, don’t curse, and never go upstairs. They must also refer to her as Ma. But as Ma’s 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.
It’s creepy and suspenseful and, unoriginal. Ma is the one movie you should be mad you didn’t get a discounted ticket. It brought to everyone’s attention as the thriller of the summer, but in reality, it fell flat. I just couldn’t get past the corny dialogue. Here is why….
The movie Ma is very predictable and cringe-worthy. Why is it that everything in the movie seems to come out of a bad soap opera? Either the kids are drunks the entire time or Ma always has flashbacks for two seconds. It was a reminder that the movie Carrie (which is actually a top thriller) plot is clearly not dead yet. With the obvious stretch of racial tension and the dramatics of trying to fit in, it was hard to know if she wanted to be young again or wanted revenge. Yes, some could say her classmates did humiliate her, but it kind of seemed she wanted her youth back until the children of the click didn’t want to be with her anymore. She snapped.
The Oscar-winning, Octavia Spencer played this character well because it was almost too easy. “Of course, get the black woman to play a deranged psychopath and make her angry the entire time of the movie, but don’t leave out she is a mother figure too”. Her dream man was a white athlete while she is clearly not well off. Oh, she also loves to party. Very over the top!
The movie was all over the place. There were too many points to follow and not enough background information to back it up. The writers did not put their all into making it believable. The trailer literally was the movie. All in all the movie 6/10 at best. That’s only because you would surely see it on Netflix in the teens’ categories under suspense or drama. Trying to piece together societies faults in a film isn’t always a bad thing, but it is when the events do not cohesively go together. Just like a highschool drama, drama.
Things we would all like to know:
I would have liked to see more of the daughter. Is she truly sick? What happened to her? Some would feel as though she is the filler character when it was not needed.
How did she not know that Ben wasn’t the one in the closet? Why at the end did the writers feel the need to point out that there is only one other black guy in the film? What was the purpose?
