Octavia Spencer | First Impressions

A horror movie that cleverly inverts one or two tropes of the genre, we ultimately feel Ma is less than the sum of its parts, but worth a look nonetheless.

Director Tate Taylor is clearly very good with actors, and every performance here is pitched well, but he doesn’t have such an aptitude for building tension or developing psychological creepiness. The writing doesn’t help him – while Mike insists that the film’s premise is full of potential, it’s not built upon very successfully. But Octavia Spencer is brilliant as the central villain, eliciting laughs and jumps at will, and her Ma is an engrossing character, if a bit reliant on cliché.

José points out the film’s concentration on women, male characters being secondary, and its interesting inversions of gender tropes, in particular a very male gaze: the objects of desire, men are disrobed and splayed out for Ma’s pleasure, and the camera doesn’t shy away from displaying them. Unfortunately, the film seems to have aimed for its 15 rating, sometimes appearing to edit around gore and explicit imagery rather than indulge in it, resulting in a somewhat disappointing feeling that it wants to be more graphic than it’s willing to be, to its detriment. One can’t shake the feeling that, for all Ma‘s boldness, there’s still a more visually expressive, confident film in here, itching to get out.

So it’s worth a look for the interesting way it deploys gender representation, and some wonderfully entertaining performances. Just don’t be disappointed if you’re a bit disappointed.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

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A discussion of the great Guillermo del Toro’s Shape of Water, a film full of what he’d describe as eye protein. It’s beautiful to look at and that visual beauty is shaped for meaning and feeling. We discuss how the opening shot evokes Sirk in Written on the Wind, Sally Hawkins’ performance; we have problems with the conceptualisaton of the Richard Jenkins character; note how the film, though it’s set in the Kennedy, era feels 30s. We discuss why all the musical clips are from Fox musicals of the classic era. In short, we discuss its characterisation, its performances, its cinematography, its relationship with the classic cinema and fairytales from which it builds. We use the word “beautiful” about two hundred times. Michael Shannon retains my vote for best actor of his generation in spite of playing a one-dimensional type rather than a fully rounded character. He conveys more with the planes of his face than other actors do with soliloquies. A fascinating but not perfect film.