phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2019

Ma



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2019
Runtime: 1h 39min
Country: Japan, USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Plot Summary: A lonely woman befriends a group of teenagers and decides to let them party at her house. Just when the kids think their luck couldn't get any better, things start happening that make them question the intention of their host.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

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Outside Reviews:

Nick Allen
2 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

The thrills come extra cheap and late in Tate Taylor’s “Ma,” a horror movie torn between campiness and compassion, all while an Oscar-winning actress struggles to hold it together. It's the initial ambition of the story that’s likely to keep you in your seat, as Octavia Spencer adds a wicked smile to her maternal persona and treats the mammy archetype as a predator. But as great as that all sounds, the film proves to be more shallow than its edgy premise and subsequent themes promise.


Katie Rife
Grade: B- - Octavia Spencer brings unexpected depth to the small-town teen horror of Ma

Scotty Landes’ script gives its star plenty to work with; there’s more to the plot of Ma than we can reveal here, and the script is littered with (mostly successful) jokes. But Spencer provides her character the kind of human dimension only a performer of her caliber could muster. Spencer’s Sue Ann is a profoundly isolated person, a middle-aged divorceé stuck in a dead-end job who’s further pushed to the margins by virtue of being a black woman in a majority white town. She dispenses moments of over-the-top insanity economically, and even then there are poignant hints of sadness and desperation behind both her plastered-on smile and her hair-trigger rage.