What kind of mother parties with high schoolers?
2019 was a bit of a tentpole year in the life of Rob Binns.
I met Melissa, my partner (of almost six years now) in February. I got promoted to Senior Writer at my job at an agency in London. I didn’t manage to get tickets for Glasto, but I was ticking all the boxes a 20-something in England’s capital should.
So perhaps it was because of all those goings on that – despite the fact that I usually keep both beady eyes fixed firmly on the latest horror films hitting screens each year – Ma (2019) completely passed me by when it came out.
Made on a budget of $5 million and grossing over $61 million at the box office, Ma apparently hit theatres in late May, before being swallowed up by streaming services and left to the murky, mercurial tides of Netflix’s constantly shifting catalogue of back-page genre offerings. It bounced around Hulu, Peacock, Prime Video, and finally Netflix – at least in Australia – where it only really came onto my radar as a recommendation at the top of my feed. (You know, those annoying autoplay ones.) Well, am I glad Ma (2019) did pop up, because it sure is a lot of a fun – all the more so because I wasn’t expecting it to be.
Ma (2019) Review
Ma (2019) follows teenager Maggie Thompson (Diana Silvers) and her mum Erica (Juliette Lewis), moving back home to Erica’s Ohio-based hometown. Erica takes a job at a local casino, while Maggie befriends Haley (McKaley Miller), Darrell (Dante Brown), Chaz (Gianni Paolo), and Andy (Corey Fogelmanis), who she develops a – mutual – crush on. One of the things Maggie’s new mates like to do is drive around looking for places to drink alcohol: but to get it, they’re forced into hanging outside local liquor stores, attempting to persuade older shoppers to buy them booze. After a few rejections, the first one to relent is a middle-aged, matronly woman named Sue-Ann (Octavia Spencer). At first, she’s the picture of benevolence and chumminess – even going as far to invite Maggie and the group to drink in her basement. It’ll keep them off the street, right? It’s her civic duty. As the increasingly sinister plot unfolds, though – and Ma turns her dusty old basement into a full-blown rumpus room which draws large crowds of drunk teenage partygoers every weekend – we learn that Sue Ann "Ma" Ellington has far more on her mind than being a good citizen.
Much, much more!
I went in pretty cold with this movie – having seen not a trailer, but that sort of brief snippet Netflix serves up when it’s trying to tempt you into a film – so, once the kids walked into Ma’s basement for the first time, I thought it was the beginning of the end for them. I was expecting Ma (2019) to unravel as a kind of extended, single-location trap ‘em and kill ‘em kind of film – picking the kids of one by one in fun, bizarre, unexpected ways. That might’ve been cool, but so is what we get – a psychological character study of a warped, corrupted mind, infused with a bit of gateway horror and topped with some of the soapier elements this type of YA fare always turns up. It’s diverting, it’s entertaining, but ultimately, Ma (2019) succeeds in its main goal: providing a pointed, poignant portrayal of the profound and long-lasting effects of high-school bullying.
It's this beat, rather than the trials and tribulations of the kids at the centre of Ma’s story, that gives the film its emotional pulse – diving back into the past, through intermittent flashbacks, to gradually reveal the extent to which a young Sue-Anne was persecuted at high school. We see, in turns, both the green shoots of Ma’s present villainy and the tragic, heart-breaking seeds that sowed them in her past.
In this way, Ma (2019) works as both antihero-driven fiction and origin story at the same time – forcing the audience to examine our own hypocrisy in both condemning the murders Ma’s perpetrates, while sympathising with the abuse she received at the hands of her classmates – now the mothers and fathers of the teenage group she latches onto at the beginning of the movie – throughout high school.
Alright: the plot of Ma (2019) doesn’t seek to reinvent the wheel. But it does do one thing particularly masterfully – in that I, for one, could never guess what was coming.
We’re drip-fed details throughout so that, when all the pieces do come together, it delivers a satisfying payload – while still remaining a surprise. This is partly down to the fact of the premise: that, although Erica grew up in this town, it’s new to Maggie – and, since Maggie is our proxy in the story, it’s new to us. There are so many connections, relationships, grudges, and rivalries – all stretching back decades – bubbling away under the surface that Maggie (and we) are unaware of. Yet, as Ma (2019) progresses, and these connections – involving Andy’s dad Ben (Luke Evans), his girlfriend Mercedes (Missi Pyle), and even Erica herself – come to light, all those submerged secrets are about to come gasping up for air.
Of course, while all that’s happening, you need strong performances to keep you anchored in the story – and here, we need to give Octavia Spencer’s performance as the titular mother a shoutout. She’s incredible: playing Ma as a kind of chameleonic character that waxes between maternal gregariousness, subtle menace, and – as we learn the full extent of the lengths Ma is willing to go to fit in – all out, unhinged, violent aggression.
As Ma first worms her way into the children’s affections before lying, bargaining, pleading, and intimidating her way into staying there, we see every weapon in Ma’s manipulative arsenal deployed – the whole cycle of toxic, narcissistic emotional abuse played out in a 90-minute microcosm, and rendered through every tic, nuance, and emotion Spencer allows to flit across Ma’s face. Under Spencer’s stewardship, the character (who, given the more far-fetched nature of the premise, could easily be a mess in less adept hands) feels real in a way that makes her motivations, and the high-school experiences that shaped her, hit home.
There are parts of Ma (2019) that don’t hit the same mark, of course.
I don’t know who else found the party scenes so astonishingly cringe-y – and the fact that these teenagers of 2019, all born comfortably in the 21st-century, were partying to songs from the 70s and 80s, made me roll my eyes – but these scenes were mostly unwatchable, and for all the wrong reasons. The kids in the group aren’t the best actors, either – with Silvers the notable exception, and Chaz’s Paolo being the most egregious example of the rule – but this is at least offset by Spencer’s aforementioned star turn, and the performance of Lewis; I struggled to watch her in Yellowjackets, but she puts in a superb shift here.
There was also no reason for Ma to underutilised the litany of superb character actors it had at its disposal to such a criminal extent. Alison Janney (1999's 10 Things I Hate About You) gets but a few throwaway lines; it’s the same for Missi Pyle (of 2004's Dodgeball), while Luke Evans’ Ben is magnetic in the all-too-few scenes he’s in as Andy’s gruff father.
The ending is a bit of a disappointment, too.
Ma (2019) is at its best at the start of the final third, where the action – and the eponymous killer's depravity – begin to build solidly towards an exciting, tension-laden final act. But, when the film should be doubling down on that excitement and capitalising on the stakes its so brilliantly built up, it ends up pulling its final punches. It’s like director Tate Taylor (who also plays a cop in the film) was caught between wrapping Ma (2019) up with a horror ending that would satiate proper horror fans, while simultaneously keeping it splatter-free enough for a younger audience. It succeeds moderately in both aims; extensively in neither.
All that said, this is a highly entertaining watch, and one of those rare horror films you can recommend to cinephiles of all ilks and proclivities. It works as gateway horror, as popcorn flick, and as a film with something a little more than either on its mind – while remaining accessible, and eminently watchable, to genre enthusiasts of varied tastes.
In the end, I want to analogise Ma (2019) – this is a bit of a leap, but bear with me – to some of the best nights out you ever had growing up. (Not dissimilar to the ones I had in those halcyon 2019 months in London, when Ma first slipped past my net and entered theatres).
The "big" nights – the birthdays, the New Year’s Eves; the ones that get planned and hyped to within an inch of their lives – always seem to fall flat. They’re films like The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023), or The Exorcist Believer (2023). Ma, by contrast, is that evening you get together with a couple of friends for a quick beer, and end up having the night of your life: fast-paced, entertaining, and exceeding expectations by sheer virtue of your lack of them.
For that reason alone, it’s worth the price of admission.
Looking for more horror films where things aren't what they seem at first glance? Read my Get Away (2024) review. Or, if you're looking for films of a slightly newer vintage than the subject of this Ma (2019) review, either The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) or Terrifier (2024) should satisfy your bloodlust. Bye for now, you maniac!
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