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Overview
This is a big production movie but you may not have ever heard about it. Big name – Jessica Chastain. Big producer – Guillermo Del Toro. Big budget – 16 million. Hollywood blockbuster – um, close. Obscure film – check. Sounds like something we should watch.
This is another international movie even though it seems like a completely U.S. movie. This probably helps give it some off beat feel while watching it. It’s well worth watching, if for no other reason than to marvel at the acting of the guy playing mama. And if you had to read that sentence to make sure you read the right pronouns, you did, and it really it great acting.
If you like the dark fairytale stories, this one fits the bill. If you like ghosts and hauntings, it has some of that. If you just like the movie because we said it should be watched – well, ’nuff said.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2023587
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_(2013_film)
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Stephen: or up to season two, episode five. I believe this is mama, which was an interesting choice, cause I, it was a. Production Hollywood one, but I don’t remember it at all. So it was
Rhys: a big production Hollywood one, like you said, the fun thing for me is that it’s not as big production. Hollywood is you think it’s big production [00:01:00] Hollywood because it’s had a big budget.
Yeah. It had a six, a $15 million budget. It had a major star Jessica chest pain. No, not at all like the black hair and short. So it had a major star in it and it was distributed by universal. It feels like a major motion picture, but it’s actually not unlike the others, a Spanish film with which is a Canadian Spanish, Mexican collaboration.
Stephen: That’s common. Okay.
Rhys: Yeah, it also, might’ve had a little bit of a common field because while he did not direct it, Guillermo Del Toro produced and financed it, it’s saw that. He had a lot of pull in it as well. And it had some very traditional Guillermo Del Toro feel to it. And it also had some very traditional Spanish, dark fairy tale feel to it as well, Spanish films.
Stephen: [00:02:00] Yeah. And I know when I was watching it cause gala that guy since he did Pan’s labyrinth, which is just really amazing. I was thinking of that a lot. And I was comparing them, which isn’t fair to movies or people to do, but Hey, if you’re involved in this really cool thing, let’s see how you do with this newer thing.
And I was like, this just is not the same type of horror movie as Pan’s labyrinth was at
Rhys: all. It really isn’t. It was the similarities with the others continues in that the film is set in Clifton forge, Virginia, but it’s mostly shot at Pinewood studios in Toronto and in Quebec city. It was shot outside of the U S while it was being supposed to be in the us with a Argentinian director financed by a Spaniard that’s distributed by an American company.
Stephen: That right there would have made me, he said, yeah, let’s watch that [00:03:00] one.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. You might’ve missed this because it was originally supposed to be released on Halloween in October of 2012, but paranormal activity four was releasing a FET date. And so they decided to bump it and they released it in January of 2013.
Well,
Stephen: paranormal activity four was not the best one out of that group.
Rhys: No, not at all, but it was a known quantity. So people would be more likely to go see it. It was written by two Argentinian siblings, Barbara machete, machete, and her brother. And Andrew went on to direct the film. Okay. It’s the only film that they ever wrote, but Andrew went on to direct a couple of films in Argentina.
He did a short version of this movie first and he did both of the chapters of their most recent version of it.
Stephen: Oh, okay.
Rhys: Please. And you’ll find that a lot of [00:04:00] people who were in mama showed up in it as well again. Yeah. Where they have people they like working with, they stick with it. Yeah. He also has worked in a post-production on the flash movie.
That’s not out yet. And on the live action attack on Titan, which is also not out yet. And he was a producer on lock and key, which I haven’t watched, but I know you have right. I’d read some of the
Stephen: books, but the show just real quick is the kind of, one of those where it’s the same basic idea, but goes in a different direction than the comics did.
So at least you’ll get surprised. It’s not a scene for scene, which has its merits. Also. I understand. Yeah, not this one. The star
Rhys: of the film is Jessica Chasteen who plays Anabel and she has 57 credits to her name. ER, was her first role. She had a role walk on rolling. ER, she was [00:05:00] in Veronica Mars, Jolene the help, Texas killing fields, zero dark 30 and our stellar, the Martian Crimson peak X-Men dark Phoenix it chapter two.
In fact, 2012, 2013 was a good period of time for her because she was the killing fields, which was critically praised. And she was in this, which actually got a lot of praise as well. This was a good stretch in her career. Not that it, her career is over or anything. Just, it was a good point for her.
Stephen: She’s become one of those that I actually went. Oh, she’s in it. Yeah. Check this out.
Rhys: Yeah. Decollage cos coaster wall Dow plays Lucas he’s Danish. And again, my apologies to all the Danish people out there for slaughtering, how to pronounce your words. He’s been in 62 other things. Including black Hawk down gods of Egypt, the Simpsons games of Thrones game of Thrones.
He was Jamie Lannister game of Thrones. Daniel Cash plays the [00:06:00] doctor, Dr. Dreyfus. He has, he’s been in tons of stuff, 182 different credits, including aliens, the Robocop TV show law and order the adventures of young Indiana Jones, goosebumps camp, rock camp of rock to the grassy of the next generation. That show just turns people out for horror films.
Stephen: That’s weird. I know that star Trek right there.
Rhys: Yeah. Star Trek discovery or from black. He did voiceover for Assassin’s creed, syndicate, watchdogs thief, splinter cell blacklist. The guy’s a very busy
Stephen: guy. That’s good. And buddy’s one of those that I’m like, man, he does look familiar, but I couldn’t have named anything.
It would probably have seen him a dozen times.
Rhys: Just in these little, this, these little roles, but you’ve seen him enough sharp NTA, she’s Canadian. She plays the older version of Victoria. And I mentioned that because the kids in this movie, there’s young versions of them in [00:07:00] older versions of them. Megan plays the older version of Victoria.
She is now 20, but she was 12 when they recorded the film. Wow. She’s been in 39 things total, including painkiller, Jane Jennifer’s, body, Gothic, red, Robin hood, red riding hood. That was out supernatural. She was the red queen and resident evil retribution. She was also in it and it, chapter two is a Bella named Elise is Canadian and she plays the older Lily.
She is now 18 that she was 10 while they recorded this. She only has 10 other movies to her credit. She was in it. Bama was her first film. Interesting note. She’s a French Canadian. She did not speak English very well at the time. And so that’s one of the reasons why Lily speaks very little in this film.
Stephen: That makes sense. But it worked, it
Rhys: needed to go. It did exactly. And then this guy, I just [00:08:00] love this guy. Javier Botet. He plays mama. He is a Spanish. Yeah. He’s a Spanish actor who plays monsters. He’s got 110 credits, including rec to rec three witching and bitching rec for Crimson peak, the conjuring to alien covenant, the mummy, the 2017 version.
He was in it. He was in the latest version of insidious. Slender man, Polaroid star Trek discovery, game of Thrones, scary stories to tell them the dark it chapter two and his house. This guy is it’s one of those kinds of things where not all actors have to be pretty. And some of you can just be very tall and creepy with really long fingers and
Stephen: it makes it and go with what you got.
And we’d probably never recognize him.
Rhys: No, you wouldn’t. Because of the amount of time he had to spend in, [00:09:00] in the chair getting made up for us, it’s huge.
Stephen: Again.
Rhys: Yeah. $15 million budget. It made 217 million worldwide. Wow. So the movie did well, there is actually a sequel in the works, but it’s been pushed back again and again, and it’s rumored to be releasing in 2023.
Lucy, Eddie actually passed on it because he was already committed to doing. So it’s being done by other cause it’s not the original director. It was nominated for 19 awards and got 11 wins, including the ASAP, the directors Guild of Canada this year Denae reward, which came up earlier, it was like an award ceremony specifically for horror movies in Europe, somewhere.
Botet the guy who plays a mama in this movie has a syndrome called Marfan syndrome, which gives him a very thin fig figure and very long fingers. Yeah.
Stephen: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So it’s not all [00:10:00] prosthetics and stuff. Correct. Now that’s definitely using God’s gifts. How you are not going to be Brad Pitt, but man, when people need a spooky looking monster, they know who to call.
Rhys: Yeah. And he’s played female spirits before, and he’s worked with machete in it playing the leprous hobo ghost creature thing. And it took him four hours a day to get into it for mama and then two hours to get out of it at the end of the day. So that’s six hours of his work day, just sitting in a chair.
Those
Stephen: work days sometimes are 10 hours and stuff. Yep.
Rhys: Wow. Isabel. And the lease at the time spoke little English, it worked out well, but that’s why she communicates so much with body language and things in the film. There’s a scene where she ends up eating moths, which you can, which I’m sure you remember the MAs the production team had this great idea.
They made the models out of chocolate. So she would be sitting there eating the mods and it would be pleasant, but she hates
chocolate. [00:11:00]
Stephen: So
Rhys: regardless it might have not been as disgusting as if they were wiggling, but she wasn’t really a big fan. That’s yeah.
Stephen: Okay. What is, it was so many kids not liking chocolate nowadays.
I don’t remember a single person in school, not liking chocolate. We were younger, but I remember Dylan, I, your son was the first one that came over and said, I don’t really like chocolate. Like really? And I there’s multiple kids. That seems weird. So
Rhys: he and Kaylee are actually interesting cause she loves chocolate and he hates it.
And so whenever they get an ice cream cake and like a DQ ice cream cake, they would just split it half and he would take her vanilla part with the icing and she’d get the chocolate part with the chocolate crunchy stuff on it. And they were pretty happy with that. But yeah, I don’t know. I can’t explain it.
Stephen: Somebody needs to do a movie about kids who aren’t, who don’t like chocolate and they are controlled and take over the world or
Rhys: they are now [00:12:00] the red headed children
Stephen: will watch that
Rhys: somewhere along the lines. Yeah. Jessica chasse, Dan was machetes only choice to play Anabel. Nobody else was even considered. She based the character on a singer and a Canadian band, the crystal castles named Alice Glass. I’ve never heard of her or the band, but that’s who she based it on the character was the bass player.
So she took lessons to learn how to play bass, which we all know how hard can
Stephen: that be? I’ll send you some links.
Rhys: So the last thing before the last thing before the second, the last thing, when you have Spanish fields that have children in them, a lot of times it does not end well for the children.
Stephen: That’s a trope like it
Rhys: is Pan’s labyrinth the devil’s backbone the others.
And now [00:13:00] this, you take a look at this and there’s this trend. In a spoiler alert way ahead of time. Everybody knows, but it’s, doesn’t end well for the children, at least for half of the children.
Stephen: No, that makes sense. Because we’ll talk about that more at the end, but I had some comments about the choice of the ending.
So I guess if it’s a Spanish thing, expect it.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And as far as what kind of movie this is, there’s a visitation here from relatives or that’s that was my thought here is you have this old relative who’s visiting you. And that’s never usually appreciated by everyone in the household, but I would classify this as a dark fairytale.
Yeah. And that got me off on this kind of side trope looking up what exactly is a fairy tale. And everybody’s got a list and the fewest number you can find are there three points that make things very tale? The biggest Sr was 10, 10 points. They have to be included to be a fairy tale, but if you go with.[00:14:00]
Three point fairy tale description. It has to have a clear beginning and an ending. It has to have elements of magic and it has to have good and evil characters tied within it. And so this film starts with childlike script, writing out the words once upon a time, which is about as clear of an opening as you could possibly have.
Stephen: Exactly. Now you’re your definition there? I loved because George Lucas always thought of star wars as a modern fairytale and it fits those three criteria in that regard. And as far as what
Rhys: I suppose it does the first one. Yeah. Subsequent ones don’t have as clear of an ending. Know what I mean? The beginning’s always, the beginning’s always there and he scripts it scrolls past you.
This is the start of the thing. But then at the end of like empire strikes back so much was [00:15:00] left up in the air.
Stephen: You’re like, but if you take that trilogy as one story, then yes,
Rhys: absolutely.
Stephen: Yeah. The first movie itself, that’s it all on its own. You have to do that. But because it wasn’t sure they were going to make the other ones.
And as far as the visitation goes, I was watching this. I’m like, it’s multiple visitations because this is a little spoilers because you have the whole family visiting that psych house and getting the free rent and staying there, they’re visiting. But then mama visits the house and doctor visits the house.
So you get all these visitors and then everybody visits the old house where the girls had been staying and were visitors there. So it’s multiple levels of visitation all over it.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. Everyone’s visiting everything here. Yeah, absolutely. But it is really interesting that you point that out because you do have the first half of the movie where you have everybody coming into and visiting this one house.
And then at the [00:16:00] end, everybody ends up coming to in visiting this other house. So you have the modern world house where everyone’s coming to visit. And then in the end, everyone’s going back to the old world house, which is
Stephen: where the whole thing wraps up, which also I was very, in many fairytales visiting the old house in the woods with bad things happening.
Yeah.
Rhys: So that’s one of the fascinating things. You always talk about putting limits on yourself when you’re creating stuff. And this is a good example of that, where he came in with this, I have this fairy tale framework I want to work within and he did really well.
Stephen: So once upon a time,
Rhys: once upon a time, and then it jumps right into what is the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008?
Yeah. And what mill Chetty does really well throughout this movie is he does exposition with various narrators throughout the entire film. And right at the start it’s a car [00:17:00] radio is giving you all the exposition of what you need to know. Cause you hear like the news talking about the financial collapse.
And then there was this business and two of the partners are shot dead and one’s missing. And you’re hearing this on the radio. And as it pans back you that this car is parked on the curb with door open outside of this very nice house. And the radio is letting you know it’s basically it is taking the place of George Lucas’s scrolling thing, telling you what has come before.
It’s ironic. Also the license plate on the car says dad on it, which is about to be evident, not really a well earned reward as a Maryland license plate. I’m big on license plates. A Maryland license
Stephen: plate. Just side note supernatural. One of the biggest ones I used was Ohio. Oh, but you can’t get it as a custom one.
Cause I think somebody already has it. Yeah. I’m
Rhys: sure. [00:18:00] So one of the partners is missing this guy named Jeffrey dishonor and you get pretty quickly that this is Jeffrey to Sanchez house. Two of his partners are dead. He’s not there. The door’s open things seem panicked. There’s the sound of a gunshot come from inside the house.
And you’re like, huh? Okay. So apparently this guy seems to have lost everything and you get all of this within the first three minutes of the movie without actually even seeing any characters, it’s just a car and a radio and a camera panning back and a gunshot sound. Then we see a young Victoria who is played by Morgan McGarry, who has not been really, I think in anything ever since, but that was the name of the actress who played young victim.
And she’s standing at a curb and a crib and she hears the gunshot and she turns her head towards the sound and hear footsteps approaching the closed door and her father bursts in and on his color. There’s a little drop of blood off his white starched collar. [00:19:00] And you can guess why he grabs both of the girls and takes off and leaves the dog behind.
Stephen: I made a note of that too. Oh man. They leave the dog. I said, that’s exactly what I said.
Rhys: I have a note in here that says the dog survived. This time go Steve-O is
Stephen: nuts. How many dogs are dying in these freaking I felt bad for the dog and. I guess that I liked, but it was also a little weird is I understand the claps, this guy’s upset, but they never really went into what he did even later.
And why he’s so distraught. He has to kill everybody. That seems very much of a major reaction. So you gotta wonder what he did.
Rhys: I suppose. I don’t know that it necessarily lends anything to the narrative. Exactly.
Stephen: Which is why it’s left out, left open and for an American movie though, that’s one of those things they usually shoehorn in there.
Cause everybody asked to know, but it’s not relevant to [00:20:00] this story. You’re
Rhys: a hundred percent correct. It’s not an American film. That’s
Stephen: true. It just looks like one. It’s a fake American film. Yeah. Go over the front facade and behind it. A Canadian Spanish setting. Yeah. Right now,
Rhys: not to be the drivers ed instructor again, but he’s driving far too fast down snowy roads and he’s obviously distracted and emotionally upset.
He should not have been driving that car.
Stephen: This road tries to tell them going too fast. Daddy.
Rhys: Yeah. Victoria is like yours. I have noted on here. He’s going so fast. Even Victoria comments on it.
Stephen: And where was he going? Exactly, because he just ran. But then in a few minutes, he’s going to want to kill the girls.
So why was he even running
Rhys: it’s off he’s driving loses control of his car. It slides off of the road. And in your typical American film, that’s it everyone’s dead because the car will explode when it reaches the bottom of whatever. [00:21:00]
Stephen: More cars, exploded movies, and they do in real life, but
Rhys: we have to set Jeffrey and the girls aside, cause we don’t know what happened to them.
Cause we cut back to the house where there’s police tape up, lots of police. And we’re introduced to Lucas, who is Jeff’s brother who arrives at the house and is asking what happened and is asking about the girls.
Stephen: Now as another aside, since this looked like an American movie and we’ve talked about this, it would have been not surprising to have a little five minute thing.
And then everything else was a flashback from that to get people interested. And we didn’t do that at all. We started and it was a pretty good hook right at the beginning. Cause it looked like a zombie apocalypse.
Rhys: Yeah, a little bit. It really did with the car abandoned. Just panning back. Yeah. I think gunshot fiscally, it was a zombie apocalypse.
Lucas asks about the girls, which brings us back to the girls. And they’re back at the car crash. Everyone survived. The radio [00:22:00] continues to fill an exposition as Jeffrey and the girls walk away from the accident site and they’re walking away. The girls are getting cold, but they find a house. And the name of the house is hell Vichy.
It’s written on a sign in the front of the house. How Vichy is the name of an asteroid? It’s also the name of a Seattle-based rock band and insurance company, a ship, a spider, a train. And it goes down in Arizona. Wow. But it’s most famously known as the allegorical female personification of the country of Switzerland.
So that’s interesting. It is Switzerland. How Visha was named after the Golish tribes who lived in the area of Switzerland and who battled against Julius. And in this case, you have a mama who has her own set of beliefs and [00:23:00] traits and things. She likes as the barbarian BDA against the Caesar, which is the modern world, which is Lucas and Annabel and the girls in their new, modern existence.
Stephen: So that’s a good one.
Rhys: I thought that was a real subtle little thing that he tied in there. But when I first saw the movie and saw it, I thought it said Helvetica and being a designer. I’m like, why
Stephen: didn’t you, I thought the same thing,
Rhys: maybe your cabin after a font, welcome to copper plate
Stephen: because you run out of certain curly cues for all the.
Rhys: But no, it’s not. It’s held Vichy, not Helvetica. So Jeffrey takes the girls inside. Victoria knows that there’s someone inside. She has seen movements. Yes.
Stephen: And that’s something I love because we talk a lot about that with paranormal stuff around here. And whenever we watch any videos, whole check this video out.
If it’s just some people and it’s shaky, I was like that’s too easy to be fake. But when you see a [00:24:00] little kid doing something, talking to somebody or doing something just out of the blue, it’s makes you go, whoa, what is going on? Because it’s been shown our brains change and we can’t perceive things the same way.
So I loved that. He did that. That was fantastic.
Rhys: Yeah. He goes in and from the looks of it, it was a very nice house and a hundred years ago, it even has that Swiss aesthetic with the furniture and stuff. It’s all these very clean lines and stuff. He doesn’t care because he’s smashing the chairs up and lighting a fire in the fireplace.
He’s not appreciating the decor. He’s having this little breakdown and Victoria is telling him there’s a woman outside and she’s not touching the floor, but he doesn’t seem to pay any attention to that. And he’s trying to decide whether to shoot himself or to kill the girls is apparently he’s in a really bad mental state.
Yeah. And I guess in what
Stephen: he imagined, so he did completely irredeemable [00:25:00]
Rhys: the dog survives to the end of the film. So who does, in what I assume he imagines to be mercy, he decides he’s going to kill the girls as opposed to leaving them to start or freeze
Stephen: to death, because this is a better choice than just leaving them at the house with their living mother.
Yeah. Whatever you did, man. But
Rhys: he doesn’t get the chance to, he has. Victoria, take her glasses up versus look, there’s a deer and she’s looking at the window. And then he like takes her glasses off over and he’s getting ready to shoot her. And she turns right. And you’re seeing it from her eyes, which are blurry.
Cause she doesn’t have her glasses on and something just floats up behind the figure that is her father wraps him up and lifts him into the air and it carries daddy away
Stephen: quickly. Yeah. Now I love that with the glasses and throughout the movie whenever, cause there’s a couple of times she takes the glasses off.
Cause that’s how mother looks at her. And I, so I [00:26:00] was like, because then when she puts the glasses on, she’s more modern. So I, it was a symbol throughout the whole movie that with the glasses off she’s at feral child again, reverted and seeing. But she could see the world differently with the class. It was strong symbolism, which we talk about.
Yeah, it is,
Rhys: it was a symbolism of clarity of mind and vision, which society has in mama does not. And it also was a symbol of sophistication and civilization and which again is not something mom was into. And the entire time she was there, she didn’t have her glasses while she was living in hell Vichy.
She doesn’t have her glasses. She and the newly orphaned Lily are sitting in front of the dying fire and a cherry rolls across the floor from the shadows. And this is 110% Guillermo Del Toro kind of thing right there. Right where, oh, here’s a cherry and it’s just going to come out of the [00:27:00] shadows into this lit circle.
And I think she’s clearly, it’s a cherry. And you get this silhouette and glimpse of mama and her hair’s billowing out like she’s underwater and it cuts to the title cards and here’s we get a new shift in, who’s giving us all of our story. Instead of it being the radio, the exposition is done with children’s drawings instead, while the credits
Stephen: are rolling, I loved that showing it helped show the passage of time.
It helped show what was, what their life was. It was the story of their life in 10 pictures.
Rhys: Yeah. It really was there eating raw wild animals are being attacked by things they’re like being lifted up to the roof by mama there’s times when they’re smiling. There’s times when they’re
Stephen: not they’re walking on all fours.
Yep.
Rhys: And you have moms, these moms show up as a symbol for mama. And so whenever she’s [00:28:00] nearby or she’s being employed. There are these mods.
Stephen: It had a definitely a adventure game, video game feel at times with stuff like that.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah, it did. Now we get to see Lucas five years later and he’s in his apartment and he has a dog and he has, yes.
And for God’s sakes, would someone please write a movie about an accountant or about a guy who stock shelves at the grocery store or works in a restaurant or something? Why are they always freaking artists? The love of God. There’s not that many of us out there and it’s not that great of a job
Stephen: author.
She’s a musician. Yeah. Yes.
Rhys: Just, oh my God, come on. But here he is. He’s your typical disorganized artists. He’s got crap all over the place. But he’s super hip. It’s got those glasses that come on [00:29:00] part in the middle. That’s cool. He’s been working with a local tracker named Burnsy, who is combing through the mountains for signs of his brother or his niece.
And he’s run out of money. He’s taken all of the money that he’s gotten from the settlement of his brother’s estate. And he’s basically spent it all on this and that’s what he’s doing. And while he’s doing that, Jessica Chaz stains character Anabel is in the bathroom waiting for a pregnancy test, which comes back negative.
And she is overjoyed by that. And that kind of sets up the two characters. Just that one little scene. You’ve got Lucas, who is this ridiculously caring head in the clouds kind of guy who’s going to do whatever it takes to bring it close to the capture of his brother. And then you have Annabel. Who’s. In the moment right now and wants nothing to do with responsibility.
Certainly not kids Burnsy and his partner are just sitting in the woods, having lunch as one does, when one’s out walking through the woods and his partner wanders off to pee, again is one does. [00:30:00] And while he’s paying, he sees the car, right? So they have victorious childhood stuffed animal, and they have their bloodhound.
He snips it and they’re off the dog, leads them directly to hell Vichy. As soon as Burnsy enters a moth waters down the hall. And he sees these children’s illustrations on the wall and an improvise doll and a giant pile of cherry
Stephen: pits. And I liked that because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure how much time it passed.
The car was a little covered, but showing this pit of cherry, I just, okay. Now I got an idea of how long passed, how did those girls survive on only a chip.
Rhys: He saw in the illustrations, they tried eating dead animals to behind him, eyes looking at this pile of cherries. You can see there is this little child figure hunched in the shadows, like on all fours, just looking at him, his partner, like here’s scurrying [00:31:00] sees the girls is freaked out by it.
And both girls jump on top of the refrigerator and are certainly like they’re complete wild animals crawling on all fours. And
Stephen: they did really good with that. Those girls for Yara as they were, they really were good at doing
Rhys: yes and Burnsy seems relatively unsettled. But other than that is time to make that call.
He calls and lets Lucas know, and we don’t get to see his conversation with Lucas, but we do get to see Annabel and her rock and band practicing. And suddenly the door opens and the lead singer of course, looks annoyed that someone is interrupted her melodious singing.
Stephen: I don’t know anybody like that.
Rhys: Lucas just comes in and is the girls are found and they’re alive and Annabelle’s whole shit.
How is this even possible? And we introduced to Dr. Dre, they had the girls set up in what looks like a typical bedroom with two-way glass so they can watch them. And the girls are not [00:32:00] normal girls. Now they’re like hiding behind the bed or under the bed crawling around on all fours. Yes. The doctor takes a pair of glasses and gives them Lucas and sends him in to give them to Victoria, which I don’t know.
That seems like pretty much in the deep end.
Stephen: I’m like, I’m waiting for the girls to attack them and I’m like, this guy has no trade either. Does doctors? Yeah, go ahead. It’ll be fine. There’ll be no.
Rhys: As soon as he walks in Victoria and Lily dive under the bed and Victoria takes a swipe at him, but he manages to get her to take the glasses.
And she puts them on and looks at him and calls him daddy. And he freaks out a little bit by that. No, I’m your super cool uncle, Luke, that couldn’t possibly be your daddy.
Stephen: God, you don’t write dialogue for movies.
Rhys: She approaches him and gives him this hug and calls him dad. And then he hugs her back. And the initial [00:33:00] bonds of regular human society have now been laid with Victoria.
Yeah, not so much with Lily. The next scene is a custody case, which the doctor continues the exposition. Now it’s gone from the radio to the children’s illustrations and now it’s the doctor testifying in court with video and it shows how the girls have began to adapt to civilization. But they’re still clinging to this mythical figure that he believes they’ve created called mama Jeffrey.
Wife’s aunt is trying to custody since Lucas and Annabel are obviously irresponsible artists, musician, people. And she actually probably has a decent point
Stephen: there. Yeah, she does. But I wondered what her motivation for being so aggressive to want these girls.
Rhys: And that’s a really good point. It was like, they took take older Karen White lady and just have her be there to be mean, [00:34:00] man, to have her way.
Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. They didn’t set anything up ahead of time to show like, even a picture on the mantle when they were going through the house. So something to set her up, but there was nothing. So Jean
Rhys: aunt Jean is one of the weak parts of this film, in my opinion, whenever you watch a movie and there is this character at odds with everyone else you’re guaranteed, they’re basically just there to be sacrificed to whatever monster spirit ghost there is.
Stephen: Theory holds up true here. It does. Yeah, because her whole aggressiveness, I didn’t get, they didn’t set it up all. They w they would’ve set it up a little better at the beginning, she would have fit better, but they were moving on so quick. Maybe it got cut and they didn’t think about it,
Rhys: or at least make her likable, at least as a viewer.
There’s some conflict of interest here. She’s nice. And she has a point, but they just made her a complete pitch. So it was
Stephen: like, yeah, we’ll show her at some point, sitting at home, watching videos where she was with the girls at birthday [00:35:00] parties or something that would have worked well too, but we don’t make movies.
So I guess we can.
Rhys: We do. And if this is the one week part of the film, that’s still it’s forgivable. She wants the kids to go live with her. And the doctors know he goes and tells. Lucas. I don’t want her taking the kids halfway, the cross country. Cause I want to study them. He has ulterior motives. There’s a book deal in here.
Give you a house. As long as you let me to keep set, allow me to keep studying them. And the judge will do whatever I say. And so Lucas is now okay.
Stephen: The one I’m like, wow, do they really have houses like that set up so they can observe people. I was like, that seems a little like extreme, but okay.
Rhys: I don’t know that they’d actually have something like that maybe, or is a safe house or something like that for a psychiatric kind of firm.
I can see where they’d have something like that. Like a halfway house kind of deal. But just for study and research seems a little odd,
Stephen: but it’s a huge house. [00:36:00]
Rhys: It is. It’s a very nice house. And the doctor starts doing him a therapy in Victoria and he’s asking her to recount her time in the wilderness and he asks her for the story.
And so Victoria begins almost like its own very fairy tale. She’s like it was a long time ago. And then she describes this woman who escaped from a hospital for sad people. And she jumped into the water and Dr. Dreyfus Watson how she could know that story. And he’s mama tell you that story. And she showed me in a dream and those words become, but they’re very prescient for what ends up happening later on in the
Stephen: movie and the story she told it made me start thinking that this seems a lot like a, there’s an urban legend myth, whatever of LA Llorona.
And this story seemed a lot like the woman in white, the woman drowning her kid and then lamenting it and, traveling the earth, looking for people or whatever. I was like variation on that culture. [00:37:00] A
Rhys: cultural kind of non to Annabel’s talking to the lead singer, their ban saying how the girls are messed up.
She didn’t even get to do it. And the lead singer, you got to dump him. She’s I can’t, she’s beat. You’re a rock star. She is. And I was, so now she’s begrudgingly a mother to two messed up little girls. Yeah.
Stephen: Which pretty much sums up any parent’s life. Yeah. We at least get a couple of years to ease into it.
Rhys: That’s right. Dreyfus brings girls to the new house. Lily spends her time hiding behind Victoria, not wearing shoes and Annabel is introducing herself. Lily calls her mama. She’s not thrilled about because she’s thinking of, oh, she’s thinks I’m her mother. That’s just what Lily calls anything that seems bigly female.
Apparently the girls walked through the house and head out into the backyard and there’s all these empty boxes back there. And Lily jumps into an empty box, just like a cat, but Victoria sees him. Which is the name of their dog. And she starts to pet him and then look back then she [00:38:00] smiles. And they’re just these steps, as you can see, as she regresses back towards normality first, it was the glasses.
Now it’s the dog.
Stephen: And she had some of that. So it’s easier Lilly
Rhys: way easier for her. The scenes follow illustrate, how the girls are adjusting. So like Victoria is sitting at the table to eat, but she’s struggling using utensils while Lily’s sitting on the floor, eating cherries or Victoria sleeps in the bed.
Lily sleeps under it. And at night Victoria’s asleep. Lily opens her eyes after the lights are out and the door’s closed. Cause she’s pretty much this nocturnal animal Dreyfus goes to the Clifton forge. Public records office is looking for information on victorious story about the sad. And the story behind the counters.
There aren’t any police reports between 2008 and 2012, that matched that story. There aren’t any mental hospitals anywhere near Clifton forge and then 20 miles or something. Then she mentioned St. Gertrude’s [00:39:00] asylum, which is a mere five miles away, but it was shut down in 1878.
And there’s a story that matches the story, telling the tale of patient Edith Brennan. And so it appears that perhaps this Edith Brennan person is who mama was at one point in time.
Stephen: And there was something wrong with her, even in those visions and stuff. Cause she long skinny arms and it’d be real life person before she became the spirits and stuff.
So yeah, it comes up later too, but even in those visions they saw. Whenever the lady, Edith mama touch someone had the black spider Webby veins running out of it. So it was always, all these visions are always across between the real memory and then a supernatural paranormal parts of it. And [00:40:00] it was interesting times hard to know what was going on.
Rhys: You bring this up frequently where you’re like, I wonder if there was some supernatural element to this Edith Brennan before she died, just like you did with the audition. And you’re like, maybe she’s got this power and I hadn’t really given it any thought. I just assumed it was her being crazy. But now you mentioned it, maybe not, maybe she was like some sort of witch or something like that.
Stephen: And it’s also a thing. He’s you see stuff like that. And a lot of his movies that little does that little twist of fantasy added in.
Rhys: I would be really interested to see how much influence he had on the film. And it’s true. It’s just because I wonder if this is machete’s vision of what it was or if he had something else in mind and Guillermo Torres.
Oh, you know what? It’d be really cool if there’s this black spider Webby thing, whenever she touched me,
Stephen: involved, [00:41:00] you might listen to them.
Rhys: Yeah. Out. So we kept back to the girls in the house and they’re coloring on the walls of the room, which I think is something that all kids should be encouraged to do color on the walls of your room for crying
Stephen: out loud.
I had a chalkboard spray and Megan painted things all over her walls. Yeah. Just paint
Rhys: over it, man. They’re sitting there and they’re humming this creepy little tune what’s with kids humming, creepy tunes in the innocence, Lily’s drawing them off. It looks to her left and there’s an actual moth sitting there.
And while she’s looking at it, Victoria grabs her blanket and runs off like it’s. And it starts to gain the chase. Annabel is downstairs doing laundry and takes the clothes upstairs. And she enters one room. And this shot is actually really well done. You can see the girl’s door is open, then a hall and you can see the rooms.
So Annabel is in one of those rooms and he Lily playing tug of war with her blanket. Then we see Victoria is [00:42:00] not in the room. So she’s playing tug of war with whom who could possibly be.
Stephen: I made a note of that shot too, because that’s a common or thing where they use the environment to split the scene.
And you think as a third party observer, that you wouldn’t have seen in a more close-up shot changing and they did it without any type of beers, anything like that, it was just the hall with the right angle to look at everything. Yeah. And once you realize, Hey, that’s not Victoria playing with Lily, and then you see Lily on yes.
Rhys: Lily starts to float and Annabel’s heading down towards the room, but just before she gets there, Victoria calls her away. So she doesn’t go in. And that raises the question. Was it to protect mama from being seen or was it to protect Annabel from being killed by mama? When she saw her? Once
Stephen: again, that shows Victoria being torn between the two worlds too.
Yep.
Rhys: Because when she goes back to the room, she takes her glasses off before she goes in, [00:43:00] because that’s what mama is going to expect. Then she closes the door and we see, as you said, Lily’s legs and she’s floating through the air. Annabel’s in the bay in practicing her base in the kitchen, of course, cause that’s where one does practice their beds and the lights start to flicker and she thinks it’s the amp.
And she turns the amp off and notices that the lights are still flickering. Then the lights go out and they flick her on just long enough that we can see Lily standing in the background. Then the lights come back on and Lily’s on the counter and jumps off in this shared jump scare for both the audience and Annabel everyone’s.
Whoa. Yeah, there is actually a jump scare in this film. It comes up later that happened that while I was watching it, the headphones and I actually jumped and I like laughed and I was watching it on the laptop with my headphones and I think maybe Kaylee was there. Kaley was home. And she’s what’s that?
I’m like, it was just, the jump scare was just really well done.
Stephen: It caught [00:44:00] me hell health LLC that got me and I knew it was coming.
Rhys: Yeah, Annabel is telling Lucas about this and she’s not ready for this. And they start to make out. And then all of a sudden she catches a glimpse of mama in the mirror and she’s convinced someone’s in the house and she’s right.
It’s just
Stephen: crazy.
Rhys: Yes. So Lucas goes to check in on the girl’s room and the door’s a jar and it pulls closed just before he can touch the handle. The opens, it notices that the windows open, but the girls both seem to be asleep. He decides to go downstairs and check, but on the way down, he notices a moth.
Then this weird rotted hole in the wall, Nancy’s investigating it. It gets bigger and more moms climb out. And then these fingers reach through the. And the shock sends him reeling backwards and he takes a serious fall down the stairs,
Stephen: the railing first, or does he [00:45:00] just go down the stairs? Let’s go over
Rhys: the railing, hit the stairs and like bounces like place because
Stephen: I was like, damn, you really gotta be jumping back the flip over a railing.
That’s like about chest height. Just isn’t there. But you gotta wonder then is that he really see that there? Or was it all in his mind, which is what a lot of these movies play with. I always liked that he ends
Rhys: up in a coma that the serious neck that’s, that was my first concern. It takes the film here.
It takes this kind of feminist turn is Annabel because up until now, Annabel was just a supporting character. It was like Lucas and the girls and the doctor. And now Annabel is it’s her. She is the one. Yeah. And out of the gate, the cops are there asking her about these, the person who supposedly was in the house and they’re very dismissive and she’s dismissive back.
She’s whatever Richmond’s finest and rolls her eyes. She’s not taking crap from [00:46:00] anybody. She’s also honest with the girls. She like sits down and she’s look, I don’t know how this is going to work out, but we’re going to try and we’ll see what happens.
Stephen: Definitely has a very punk attitude through the whole thing.
Rhys: Pretty much right up
Stephen: until the end. Yeah. She suddenly becomes a mother. Yeah, very good.
Rhys: And Annabel’s having dreams about mysterious groaning sounds in the house and things. So she has, she’s got some sort of PTSD just over the trauma from their initial contact with mama Dreyfus comes over to look at the new drawings.
And as he’s looking at the pictures, he finds this makeshift doll from . And he goes through his hypnotherapy data and finds out that the doll was made by mom. And during his line of questioning, he catches Victoria looking up over his shoulder while she’s answering. And now he’s paranoid, really looking over his shoulder.[00:47:00]
He gets a message from the lady at the public records, telling him that she found something. He would want to see what that is. We’ll have to wait because we cut back to the house now and Annabel is opening a can of food and Victoria’s coloring maybe at the table. And Lily is unschooling paper towels and chewing on them.
And she asks them if they’re okay and they both nod. Yes. And Lily keeps looking over her shoulder into the other room and smiles, which is like a moth. We know that means that mama must be nearby, right? Annabel, tux, Victoria into bed and tells her good night was. Billy just yells no at her. So she leaves and goes to bed in the girl’s room.
The closet door slowly opens and the dog is in there and starts to growl padding over to the closet door. And I thought, oh, Steve’s not going to this dog,
Stephen: Lily crawls out a little Wiener dog. He’s not really the [00:48:00] biggest attack animal
Rhys: Lily crawls out from under her bed. And she goes over and says, Victoria, come mama and Annabel can hear Lily humming through the air vents.
And then a mature voice starts to hum. The same song. She heads down to the room, hearing the girls giggling and laughing and she opens the door and sees just the two of them. She’s like late. You know what time it is? And she walks over where the closet doors at jar and Victoria says, don’t go into the closet.
She just closes the door. And she tells them to close the door and she leaves. She tells Dreyfus about it. And he tells her that he thinks and tells him that she thinks that girls are being visited. She says, she heard this voice and Dreyfus is interested, but he believes that Victoria is just associative.
And on some level she is mama herself. That’s right. We finally get to the county [00:49:00] archives, or we get to see Dreyfus in this historic records curator. And they actually have the body of Edith Brennan’s baby in a shoe box back there,
Stephen: which I was like, okay, wait a second. So they showed everything. So they just, okay.
We’ll just hang on to it like this. That was a little weird for an Indiana Jones scene.
Rhys: It felt like Raiders lost art box rows and rows of boxes.
Stephen: This lady masticated body. Okay. And it wasn’t NAD. That’s the thing. So was, did they not get the body recovery until after it was all dedicated mummified or did they just shove it in a cardboard box?
It ignored the smell till it went away. What did they do?
Rhys: Yeah, or, yeah. Okay. I was just gonna say part of me wonders if the baby had been dead way back when and Edith just audit what’s [00:50:00] alive. Yeah. Grave robbing or something like that.
Stephen: Wow. Yeah. That’s a good point. That could very well be. I could see that.
Definitely. It was still weird. Here’s the body of the box
Rhys: gives this speech. The ghosts are an emotion bent out of shape, condemned to repeat themselves. And the language is almost verbatim to the definition of goats out of Crimson peak and the devil’s bank. Both are Guillermo Del Toro films, this little snippet from his film, but got injected he’s yeah.
She gives him the box and tells him to fix this thing. This is no, this is a wrong, that needs corrected. So now he’s in the possession of an infant skeleton. Yay.
Stephen: Which this was a different type of movie. He would mix that up with the gift. He’s giving his wife and he confused them. And then we’d have this comedy of errors trying to.
Different
Rhys: movie. Yes. Mama opens the [00:51:00] box and there’s lingerie in it. Annabel is back at home and we’re back with Annabel and the girls at home. And she hears the girls are maybe just Lily whispering to someone and we see mama floating behind her. But when she turns around, mama’s
Stephen: got, and I did, for most of this movie, it was very short glimpses, only partial glimpses, a mom, which I think it makes the movie better in general, when they start showing clothes of the monsters, it loses it sometimes because it’s very hard to make that look realistic enough.
I except for the CG. Now you can do that a little better. It’s a good example. I had some good close-ups that looked good. But for this movie, I thought the tension was so much better with just a little bit here and there. Build it up really well.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. And I think too, that when you do finally get to see her clearly, even the shots.
Yeah. So you don’t have time to sit there and linger on the fact that this is actually a man in prosthetics.
Stephen: I did a little bit of [00:52:00] other work with that to make it look the way it is, but I think combination
Rhys: it was done well. So this next scene is right out of a Stephen King book. I saw this scene and I was like, this is something this happens in Stephen King all the time.
We’re at the hospital and the lights start flickering and the computer terminal starts to type out M a and there’s mods all over the place. And then Lucas is visited by the twitchy ghost of his brother who tells him to save his daughters. And he’s standing at this bridge and he points in this direction and he saved my girls, go to the cabin this whole time.
Lucas is having a seizure and the doctors get him stabilized. But Stephen King does that a lot in his books. We have this evil force and he introduces this one, one thread of good that’s really struggling to the point home. And it’s okay. Here. It is in that little bit of knowledge, it’s just enough to get the hero to whatever they need to do.
Yeah.
Stephen: Which I thought it was. [00:53:00] Okay. So you had a vision while you’re in a coma. So now that you’re, you’ve got your point in life, what you do, but I did like how they intersect the real world with the paranormal. Because again, this is something we talk about around here a lot. And in the paranormal supernatural world, he’s seeing his dead brother.
He’s getting a message. He’s seeing where to go to the bridge, but in our normal real-world, he’s having a seizure. So that’s how it’s interpreted in the different routes. You could say. Yeah. And that’s a common thing too, cause it’s easy to show on movies. I, cause I talk about that sometimes if there is something to a paranormal realm that we just don’t understand yet science
Rhys: wise, oh no
Stephen: raise you
Rhys: died.
We were doing so well, let me try to refresh.
Stephen: There you go. There you are. Okay. But [00:54:00] I was just going about the intersection between the realms. And so there are things sometimes where I wonder if there’s things we just don’t understand what science yet. And we interpret them different because of how it looks from our world viewpoint.
And I argue with Colin about that at times. And I point out how many times in the past. 50 a hundred, 200, 500 years something Galileo was killed because of his scientific observations, but people didn’t believe it at that time. And now it’s science and not a magical belief. My point anyway, back to our previously scheduled movie behind the, yeah, that’s funny because I did wonder what those were.
I’m like, is it like a dummy worm or something that she’s eating and she had it all over her mouth. So that fits with chocolate. I like that in a minute. He’s well enough to get dressed and run out of the hospital. So whatever [00:55:00] in today’s parlance, Jean is definitely a Karen. No. Yeah, at least. Yeah. If someone’s buying an expensive gift after this hope, hope Annabel, didn’t watch that movie.
Yeah, he leaves, but then he wants to go to the old house. That was a little bit, they didn’t show enough of him coming to terms with it and deciding I’ve got to do this. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that whole scene, but you said that maybe she had other issues, maybe the baby wasn’t even hers. Maybe it was dead with the way the people were chasing her.
It was very mean and aggressive, which I’m not sure they would’ve known she stabbed on none yet. I can see moldable theories of why this all happened. So maybe, or maybe it’s Lily D we’ll come to that. Yeah. Yeah. [00:56:00] This is where I started noticing the music throughout the movie has been very mood setting and very creepy.
It’s not very, it’s not like melodies and stuff so much. It’s very disjointed at times, but it definitely sets the mood and atmosphere. So yeah, it’s a feeling that it’s setting way more than a soundtrack. You’re going to listen to. Okay. The flash continued to go off and take pictures when he dropped it.
So it had the land perfectly on the shutter to keep going. I was like, yeah, we should have kept track of all these things happen. Anyone listening, go back to the episodes, figure that out, show us a chart. That’d be awesome. They a drink for this trope and this one, right? Yeah. Yeah. And at the end with what happens, I was like coming back to the [00:57:00] scene.
I’m like, why did they do that to try and make the impact writer? It just, it seemed weird that they would start bonding and Lily would start to come back and then do the ending they did. Yeah.
Rhys: You hope?
Stephen: Yeah. I will say though, the girl that played Lily her face was amazing to watch through the scene because it was, yeah, she was doing such a good job with just that little wonder that she portrayed. I was very impressed with that. It’s not my house, but that’s okay. Yeah. Had that. And all Annabel hears is the click of the door.
Yeah. Now one thing about mama is with the closet as the movie progressed. Mamma goes darker at the beginning. She’s just playing with the girls and you don’t see her much, but now you’re starting to see her more. Annabel’s registering her [00:58:00] more. She’s getting, mama’s getting way more aggressive, but it also is partly because the girls are getting more normalized, but it shows that whole arc of the story is pretty well done.
It builds up pretty well. She’s having a very weird couple of days. Weird mine acts up to welcome to the redneck wireless or redneck cable anyway. So the fully work pause, and the part where the sounds were going through the vents and stuff, and then you heard it get deeper. So that was good. Yeah. That was a good, special effects in that.
It looked good. Yeah. Now this whole thing here, Lily gets scared and run. And she’s helping Victoria try and wake up Annabel and all that jazz. So that again, at the end, she does reversal from that. It seemed like with the [00:59:00] bonding and this, she was coming closer to it. And then they changed that so that I wasn’t completely happy with how they ended it, because I didn’t think the story led to that.
That’s why not that it was horrible. It just didn’t, they didn’t lead up to it. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. I hear you. Okay. No, I’m here. I hear you. Yeah. Yeah. It just happened to be on the road right. When she drove by, yeah. Which that leaves it, that I can see where the CQL could come in. It could still be her because I was like, okay, you have your child.
But then there’s Nope, don’t care about that anymore. I’ve got this new one I’ve got to get and I, it was like, wow. So I could see, even though everything happens here at the end, there could be a sequel with her still. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. That’s, what’s keeping her [01:00:00] grounded in our world. She’s like the Terminator here, but she’s down and just keeps crawling.
Yeah. Where’s Lily, you took responsibility. Yeah. And skip the reality of it, but that’s very tales too. And I, I dunno the thing with all Lily, holy at the end. Big on happy endings and horn. So this was a half happy, but when they hit that branch, I expected Lily to be hanging there. The baby was originally and in the one flashback, they showed the blankets and stuff still there.
So I wondered if the baby originally was hanging there and died hanging on the branch before they got it. And I was waiting for Lily to behave. True. True. That’s true. And that scene with the nine that she kills, maybe I’ll go back and just look at that. Maybe they were had the dead baby and they were preparing it for burial and stuff.
And that’s when Edith snapped and don’t take my baby that’s [01:01:00] seems plausible. That that fits to what you said about the ghost. Don’t remember. Cause we, our memories change as we remember them and you know that yeah, that fits very well with that whole scenario like that. Which if we’re going to watch an American film, let’s watch the American film that isn’t an American film.
I love that. So for next time, but we decided we’re going to do Krampus it’s Christmas season, and that’s a great visitor. There was a lot of super crappy ones, super crappy to the point where this is like the college students filming it. But they’re actually the woodshop college students, not the film major college students.
There’s a bad trip. Is movies. There we go, mama. Good to go.
