I’ve said this before, but a great actor doesn’t make a great movie special. No way. A GREAT actor makes a terrible movie watchable. Ma to me is more proof that Octavia Spencer is a great actress than that Oscar she won for the Help. Seriously, ask all the Lifetime movie channel programmers desperate for Ma’s story.
Spencer’s Ma doesn’t show up for a bit. Instead we meet Erica (Juliette Lewis) and Maggie (Diana Silvers), who leave the West coast for somewhere in Podunk USA. Maggie makes it in with the cool kids in school: Haley (McKaley Miller), Andy (Corey Fogelmanis), Chaz (Gianni Paolo), and Darrell (Dante Brown). So what do cool kids do in a small town? Start fires and drink every weekend. To do that, they need a place to drink and some booze. Enter Ma (Spencer), who offers to buy the kids alcohol and let them party at her place. However, Ma’s friendliness for the kids gets nosier and nosier, forcing Maggie to wonder what else is going on with her.
Tate Taylor was Octavia Spencer’s director on The Help, so he knows how to best utilize her talents for maximum effect. The script’s one biggest strength is Ma’s backstory, which Spencer sinks her teeth into. In a horror movie, you usually want to get right to the killin. However, in a movie like Ma with no supernatural threat, some time developing your homicidal psychopath into a person can help make the audience squirm a little more in their seat (think Norman Bates). Spencer takes the little pieces of Sue Ann’s (Ma’s real name) backstory and really digs into them, showing Ma’s descent into madness as a journey of rotten people creating a vile rotten person. This makes it easier for Spencer to sell Ma’s transformation, leaving audiences repulsed in a more complex way than your run of the mill slasher movie. It also makes the big payoff sinister, creepy and sad in equal measure.
Ma will also stay with you longer after you leave because of the general commentary on living a detached life and how it affects others. The movie effectively uses its location to show how kids and adults might be captivated by looking into a phone over dealing with their reality: an unchanging life. Ma repeatedly is yelled at by her employer to get off the computer/her phone to do actual work at her actual job. However, we know better: Ma’s reality is living for Instagram stories and Yearbook quotes, which was not helped by her past. Conversely, Maggie was raised very well by her mom; she has enough of a relationship with her to know that they’re in this together, and that her mom taught her to be her own person, not defined through others. As such, when bad things start happening, Maggie is able to deal with the stress on her own, while Ma basically cannot.
Ma is destined to be enshrined in streaming/cable run glory. It will be a perfect movie to put on in the background, and watch while doing something else. And Octavia Spencer will be there to rope you back in, make you sign her year book, and make you like and comment on her Instagram story about you. Or else…