MAMA! The Motherly Horror..
My First Impression
When I read the movie title in the channel guide for the first time, I thought it was all about a social movie that narrates a mother’s life in certain circumstances. I never thought it is a horror film that addresses a tragic story of a disordered mother’s ghost!!
The Tragedy Begins
As the movie starts with the disordered father trying to murder his young daughters for his financial crisis, you feel desperate and anxious that you want to save these daughters by any means and suffer from the feeling that this destiny shouldn’t be for them, till the mysterious entity does it itself and saves them. At this moment, you take your breath even when you can’t figure out what that thing is which saved them and offers them cherries!
Mother Is Mother Even If A Ghost
Moving on, five years later, when the girls’ uncle reaches them and though they are not developing like any other child as a result of living their first years in the wild, you see their love growing inside them towards the ghost who cared for them. They love the ghost that they call MAMA. We all fear ghosts, those ugly scary entities. However, the movie shows you that a mother even if she is a ghost can be loved by children for her love and care she offers especially that one of the girls is one- year old. They wait for her to play together. They even understand her feelings when she is angry or jealous.
Emotional Paradox at All Fronts
At some point, you feel happy that divine care saved those poor girls from the tragic destiny but on the other side, you feel terrified that what saved them was a ghost which, according to the movie description, was a “distorted figure that’s barely recognizable as a human being”.
We see the ghost attacking everybody except the kids. It has all the characteristics of any ghost we ever saw in movies, but when it comes to the kids, it converts to a real mother, with all the emotions of a real mother.
When the protagonist presented to her the corpse of her dead baby, she converted to the human figure. She recovered her mother figure with all its face features reflecting the motherhood. However, all this changed as she threw away the remains of her baby in the water from the cliff and reverted to the ghost figure once she heard the younger girl calling her MAMA!. She forgot all about what caused her suffering and started over the battle to take back the girls she cared about for years.
Tragic End
The elder girl is restless and confused. She likes her normal life and at the same time loves MAMA, whereas her younger sister is totally attached to MAMA’s world, as agreed without any minor hesitation to go with her. She did go with her very happily for the reunion, in spite of her sister’s begging to not go with MAMA and leave her.
At this moment, as the movie ends, we feel torn,overwhelmed with sadness, crying for the sisters' separation, but the movie does not want to leave us completely sorry, so it shows how the young sister converts to a butterfly standing on the elder's hand which renders her slightly cheerful for not losing her sister forever.
As a conclusion, the movie makers succeeded in manifesting the magnificence of motherhood emotions, no matter what the circumstances are, to the extent you feel sympathetic to the ghost and can’t hate or feel fully frightened of the movie horror.
