Ma--Octavia Spencer seems like a game sort. She even came back to reprise her small role from Bad Santa in Bad Santa 2, though she'd won the Oscar for The Help between the two films. It suggests a lack of pretentiousness worthy of a British actor.
Now Spencer stars as the title character in Ma, the latest from the admirable Blumhouse factory. She plays the heck out of Sue Anne, a small-town veterinary nurse who gets confronted with a classic adult moral quandary: teenage kids ask her to buy them alcohol outside a liquor store. She refuses at first, but then, charmed by their pleas and flirtations, she gives in.
She later offers the kids the use of her basement, on the theory that they're safer partying there than outside somewhere. They dub her "Ma" and before long her basement is a popular party spot for the area teens. Her young guests are forbidden, however, from going upstairs. Other disturbing signs arise from this creepy but somehow distressingly plausible social scenario.
Though the product varies in success from movie to movie, I admire the commitment of Blumhouse Productions to provide their young audience with good value on a modest budget. Ma is one of the company's most interesting efforts to date; a horror movie based on character development and queasy inappropriateness rather than shocks. Spencer is emotionally naked here without hamming; using only shifts of expression on her sad-clown face and in her voice, she makes Sue Anne's motivations so painfully obvious that we don't really need the explanatory flashbacks to explain her psychology.
The director is the Mississippian Tate Taylor, who also directed Spencer in The Help. Working from a script by Scotty Landes, Taylor maintains a good balance between genuine pathos and macabre comedy, and he gets strong performances out of the youngsters, especially Diana Silvers as the good-girl heroine. There are amusing turns by vets like Juliette Lewis, Luke Evans and Missi Pyle, among others.
The violence doesn't really start until the last quarter or so of the movie, but once it does, Ma turns into a wild melodramatic bloodbath. This gory homestretch is entertaining enough, in a twisted sort of way--it even includes a gruesome outrage that Lionel Atwill committed in Murders in the Zoo back in pre-code 1933. This lurid stuff probably lessens the impact of the subtle, uneasy chills that precedes it, but not enough to dismiss the commanding potency of Spencer's performance. Be forewarned, however: Ma isn't a very comforting movie for parents of teenagers.
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