MAMA

Universal Picture

Executive Producer by:  Guillermo Del Toro

Starring by: Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Megan Carpenter, Isabelle Nellise

Again…it’s a creation of Guillermo Del Toro…after seeing Don’t Be Afraid of The Dark, I realized that Del Toro once again tries to build a story among the kids life. In the old one, he describes a monster attack from the shape of tooth fairy, which I love the modification but this time is better. This time, Del Toro manage to modified the life of Tarzan to become the horror live of two young girl, Victoria and Lilly..

Being dispose by their father, who committing a shoot to his business partner and wife during economy crisis, Victoria dan Lily almost kill on the cabin if some phantom woman didn’t help them to vanish the mad father. Like Tarzan, Victoria and Lily become an orphan, and alone inside the cabin the two young girls find some figure who helped them to survive the years.

The way of those two young girls walks, like spider-gollum, remind me of Tarzan’s walk which similar to wolf…crawls. And I thinks they better be stay on that cabin despite to be found by their uncle who conducted the search for almost six years long. In the process of adoption, Dr.Dreyfuss found some characters that followed the girls called Mama. In the beginning, Dr.Dreyfuss thinks mama is only the fantasy character built by Victoria but he finally knows that the mysterious character does exist.

Lukas, the uncle took the two girls to his house to take care by him and his girlfriend, Annabelle. But they experience some weird things since the girls came in. Lukas is attack and it made some broken neck for him. Luckily, Lukas is rescued. He managed to get hospital on time and get treatment to save his life. Otherwise, Annabelle has a nightmare that she’s attacked by ghost several times. She also heard weird sing by unknown figure and the kids, and feels unusual presence…

There are two best scenes that I liked from this movie…

First is the scene where Lily has playing a blanket pulled. I thought that she’s been playing around with her sister, Victoria. But Victoria shows herself and come across the room which left Annabelle wonders with whom Lily playing with. But Victoria appeared at the right time to stop Annabelle to enter the room. 

And the second ones, is the scene where Annabelle see’s a shadow figure behind the sofa while she clean up the mess on the desk of the girl’s room. At that time, Victoria was cooking in the kitchen down floor. Annabelle talks normally because she think the figure is Lily, but Victoria said that Lily also waiting for her in the kitchen and she’s hungry if Annabelle is not come down right away.

From then Annabelle realized that something went wrong, and it came from the wardrobe. Dr. Dreyfuss tells her about Mama, but not like the psychiatrist that thinks it’s only Victoria’s creation Annabelle believe there’s more than imagination friend they’re dealing with.  

Although the modification was good, I prefer the plot of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. As the haunting ghost movie, I realized that the tense from the thrill is mediocre. There’s nothing new from the ghost sightings.

In fact I found out about the strange situation from the scene where Annabelle rebuked the two girls to stop playing in the middle of the night and go back to sleep. But the windows, although cover by curtain, shown a little light of a day time. The mistakes also happened, such as Dr.Dreyfuss laptop. 

When Annabelle took it from his office it shown it brand, Sony Vaio. Sony runs Windows system, but when she operated the computer to research about Dreyffus finding about Mama, it seems that the operating system appears to be a Mac. The gadget mistaken not stops there, when Annabelle click the folder that contain the research it’s mistakenly labeled “research”. Small but annoying!

The last part ends with sadness. The phantom mama certainly wants both girls companied her to finish what she desired by raising them in the beginning. The phantom wants to take Victoria and Lilly to jump off from the cliff like she did in the 1800 so they will be together forever. In the other hand, Annabelle and Lukas want to save Victoria and Lily to stay alive. They try very hard to stop Mama from being taking both girls.

Finally, Mama took Lily to the final cliff but Victoria stays because Annabelle hold her hard so the phantom not able to push furthermore. It very sad seeing Victoria separate from her sister, Lily, but I think it’s the best condition for both side. Mama happy to get Lily, Lukas and Annabelle happy to get Annabelle, although I know that’s not an ideal condition for Victoria or Lily who want to be together.

From the story I learn that no matter how short you know someone, if you give warm impression to his/her it will melt a cold heart and put your figure to his/her heart for a very long time. And like Tarzan, who remembering and tasting the life as a human that turns him from animal-like-human become a real human, Victoria change from animal kids that raise by Phantom Mama to completely human as she feel the care of Annabelle as her real Mama…