I’m “biast” (con): …but not so much like this.
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
The cinematic efforts of men — here, director Tate Taylor (The Girl on the Train, Get on Up) and screenwriter Scotty Landes, a TV writer making his feature debut — to delve into the inner lives of women continue to fail abysmally, in particularly horrific manner with Ma, a disgraceful waste of the brilliant Octavia Spencer. She deserves so much better than this bargain-bin cockadoodie shadow of a pseudo-Misery wannabe. I console myself with the fact that she was probably at least paid well.
In a small American town, where everyone knows everybody’s business except when convenient to the plot that they don’t, lonely Sue Ann (Spencer: A Kid Like Jake, Hidden Figures) insinuates herself into the lives of local high-schoolers — centrally, new girl Maggie (Diana Silvers: Booksmart, Glass) — by buying them booze and letting them use her basement as a party den. And then she rapidly turns on these kids in dumb, schlocky ways that anyone who has seen a horror movie before would have clocked the moment she showed them into her serial-killer-lair basement. Except it all enjoys so little psychological rationale on Sue Ann’s part that I guess that’s supposed to make her behavior “surprising” and “suspenseful”?
Not at all unexpected on our part is that these teens are the children of the kids who were awful to Sue Ann in her own high-school days, and so now she will pour her long-festering ire onto the kids because, you know, bitches be crazy, that’s just how it is.
There’s no build-up of tension, no escalation of revenge, just a zero-to-60-in-two-seconds turn to the monstrous for the “cool” adult the kids have taken to calling “Ma.” The torture porn it becomes is horrible, as is the waste of an amazing cast, which also features Luke Evans (Professor Marston & the Wonder Women), Allison Janney (I, Tonya), Juliette Lewis (Jem and the Holograms), and Missi Pyle (Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle). But worst of all is the casting of Sue Ann as an psycho bitch whose revenge is mostly misdirected and always wildly out of proportion to the crimes committed against her.
What happened to Sue Ann is definitely awful, and it’s the most plausible thing we see onscreen here: girls are subjected to this shit, and do suffer as a result of it. But instead of honestly confronting how women cope, or don’t, with abuse, bullying, and trauma, Ma ensures that any such coping is drawn as extreme and unreasonable. If boys and men wanted to exonerate themselves for how appallingly they can treat girls and women, that might look like Ma, which not only has no sympathy for Sue Ann, it reduces her to the most cartoonish sort of cheesy villain, and hence renders her pain as eminently dismissable, except for how it can be appropriated for entertainment purposes.
Saw it today and found it pretty far-fetched, struggled with my willing suspension of disbelief that these kids would continue to go hang with the obviously crazy woman, among other logic problems I had with the movie. And although I agree, MaryAnn, that what happened to Sue Ann is definitely awful, I didn’t believe for a minute that humiliation like that would play out in that manner – another on-screen display of high school kids supposedly being comfortable enough with themselves to choreograph such a degrading dance, not one of that student body displaying a shred of decency and coming to her aid. But movies need the drama and horrible treatment by others en masse in broad daylight and this aint real life. (Back in my day, in the real world, a youthful Sue Ann would have suffered a sad fate indeed. She would have have been ignored – more “At 17” by Janis Ian rather than the cheap but necessary plot point at that point in a creepy at best B-movie horror flick with an A-list cast.)
I hate to sound like I’m defending this movie at all, but that seems very plausible. Too many people simple stand by in the face of injustice, even when it’s happening right in front of them. Grownups do it all the time, but add in teen anxiety and peer pressure (no one wants to defy the popular kids, lest you become the next target), and it’s sadly realistic that no one would stop it happening.
Fair enough, MaryAnn, point taken. What I mostly roll my eyes at going back to the Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990) television series and plenty of teen sex romp movies, is the complete lack of authority figures in the lives of high school teens as they bop around town and in and out of living rooms and bedrooms and scheme with tremendous ease and comfort with themselves as if they were 25 years of age and not awkward teenagers with acne, braces, physiques not fully filled out yet and self-esteem issues – the high school realities that the bulk of us were familiar with.