Mama (2013)

A banker goes mental, kills his work colleagues and his wife, then kidnaps his two young daughters and drives away with them. Before he can get too far though his car skids off the road, down an embankment and crashes into woodland.

He leads the girls away from the wreck to an abandoned cottage where, five years later, the two girls are found by trackers employed by their uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from Game Of Thrones), an impoverished illustrator who lives with his hot rock chick girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain).

The sisters, Victoria (Megan Charpentier) and Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) are pretty much feral but the eldest - Victoria - tells psychiatrist Dr Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash) they were looked after by "Mama" who ran away from a "hospital for sad people" with her baby.

Because Lucas and Annabel can't afford to care for the children, Dreyfuss arranges - in return for continued access, so he can study the children - for them all to move into a large house owned by the hospital.

Soon after they move in though, Annabel begins to suspect that the girls might have brought someone - or something - back from the woods with them.

Mama is a well-made, very old school ghostly horror story carried by the wholly convincing performances of the central characters, some clever scares along the way and a plot surprisingly unburdened with unnecessary red herrings.

As well as praise for the actors, I have to give credit to director Andrés Muschietti, who co-wrote the script with Neil Cross and Barbara Muschietti, as he uses a fair degree of smarts and subtlety to weave the movie's creepy atmosphere - instead of simply relying on jump-scares (and even when they are used they are done well).

Mama, herself, (portrayed by both Javier Botet and Hannah Cheesman, aided by the vocal talents of Laura Guiteras and Melina Matthews) has a rounded backstory and convincing motivations for her jealous guardianship of Victoria and Lilly and it's this that drives the story.

Unfortunately, that's not to say Mama's perfect. There's a stand-out moment of rank stupidity that surely could have been addressed in a less clichéd way: Dr Dreyfuss goes back to the spooky cabin to follow some clues, but goes in the middle of the night. In the pitch dark. You just know that's not going to end well and is quite groan-worthy, especially given the generally high calibre of the screenplay.

There's also a rather clunky moment when Lucas is in hospital and Mama is coming to pay him a visit and a computer starts spelling out the word "Mama" over and over again. Once you discover Mama's backstory the idea of her having any concept of a computer or its operation seems totally incongruous.

But my biggest gripe, and it's an odd one, is on account of "Chekov's gun" - the dramatic principle that if you have a loaded gun on stage in act one it will eventually be used. For some reason, and I can't believe it was penny-pinching, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays not only Lucas but his brother Jeffrey (the guy who goes nuts at the start). It's never even stated that they are twins, just brothers.

I thought this might pay-off in some way relating Mama's interaction with Lucas back to her first encounter with Jeffrey in the pre-credit sequence. But no. Nothing. And I'll be honest it's slightly distracting.

I've seen a fair bit of criticism of the ending of the movie, but for me it worked and tied off the plot with a neat little bow. It's neither the entirely happy ending this style of storytelling often has nor the sudden, shocking reversal where everything unexpectedly goes to hell in a handbasket just when you thought everyone was safe.

Barring a couple of bumps along the road, Mama is a solid, intelligent, old fashioned ghost story with a downbeat ending.