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‘Ma’ Review: Dir. Tate Taylor (2019)

Octavia Spencer goes against type in service of a delightfully bonkers thriller from the director of The Girl on the Train and The Help.

There is a great sense of pleasure in seeing a performer tackle a role that you would not usually expect of them. It is particularly pleasing when that actor or actress chooses a role that allows them to really let loose and deliver something so odd, so mad and so knowingly off the rails, that you can’t help but reel your head back with giddy delight. Such is the case with Octavia Spencer and Ma.

Teenager Maggie Thompson (Diana Silvers) has just moved back to her Mom’s (Juliette Lewis) home-town. Maggie quickly makes new friends at school, the type of friends who like to pass the time in their quiet town driving around and trying to score alcohol. When they manage to convince the older Sue Ann (Spencer) to buy them booze, Maggie and her friends begin to develop a friendship with Sue Ann, who they come to call Ma, after she offers out her basement as a place for them to come party away from the police. Yet things with Ma may not be as cosy as they seem.

With Ma and Neil Jordan’s Greta coming out within only a couple of months of each other, an argument could be made that the thriller genre is taking a turn back to the 90’s brand of weird, eyebrow raising thrillers that operate in the realms of violent camp. While there may not be as strong an erotic element as the likes of Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction (although there it is certainly still present in Ma), it’s hard not to think of Ma in a similar vein. Particularly when everything starts to unravel.

It is clear from very early on that all is not quite right with Ma. Her behaviour towards the young teens who she attempts to befriend and eventually exploit is uneasy from the off. That sense of uneasiness continues to grow through Ma’s increasingly odd behaviour that accentuates as we discover more and more about her past and how that links with the young teens at the centre of the plot.

This approach to escalation, while occasionally unnerving and certainly entertaining, is very much hindered by Taylor’s lack of establishing perspective. The film often seems at odds with itself as to whether or not it wants to be a film about Maggie (who is very much our vessel into the story) or a more emphatic look at Ma’s obsessive nature. It ends up yo-yo-ing in between the two, so any sense of character development does feel quite surface.

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Yet, at the same time, this is a film that knows exactly what it’s about and goes about that business with a level of exploitation that veers from camp, to nasty, to sadistic, to downright hilarious. The scares are very much played as cheeky cheap shots to make you jump and squirm, asking for the composer to add in a lot of ominous deep bassy notes on cue to the editing, while the violence if the right balance between shocking and ludicrous. It is all over-the-top and quite ridiculous, but it all feels very deliberately so.

Much of why Ma proves to be as fun a ride as it is comes down to its star. Spencer has already proven how versatile an actress she is, but this is like nothing else we’ve seen her do before. She relishes the chance to play full psycho, finding her inner Norman Bates to deliver a turn that is both sympathetic and entirely mad. She embraces the absurdity of the situation and commits to making both the teens at the focus and the audience squirm, laugh and gasp.

Ma is by no means a great film, it has far too many issues with structure to quite earn that title. But when it commits to escalating the violence and mayhem, you won’t know whether to hold your belly laughing or peer through your fingers with unsettled fright. It is an absurd thriller that ups the schlock and the shock while never forgetting to have fun along the way, with Spencer proving to be a wicked delight. If you like your horror campy and funny with a devilishly nasty edge, then Ma will most certainly take care of you.

Ma is released in cinemas from 31st May.

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