You wouldn’t know it from the ad campaign, but Blumhouse’s new thriller MA, starring an unlikely Octavia Spencer as an sociopathic, small-town stalker, is a (slightly) more nuanced film than it needed to be, largely due to its star’s determination to layer its shlock with a believable portrait of loneliness and obsession.
Directed by Spencer’s longtime friend and The Help helmer Tate Taylor, it’s a picture with a canny marketing hook—take an Oscar-winning actress known for drama and send her off the edge and into a bunny boiling frenzy—and one that pays perversely fun rewards, the star grounding an outrageous character in a near-sympathetic reality, while clearly having a grand old time pulling our chains.
Picture opens on the resettling of sixteen-year-old Maggie (Diana Silvers) and mother Erica (Juliette Lewis) in small town Ohio, where Erica grew up and the pair returns after a messy divorce. Erica, whose plans to “make it” in California have fizzled after being ditched by a philandering husband, takes a night job cocktailing at the local casino. And as any single parent of teenagers knows, working nights is a recipe for all sorts of problems.
Maggie has no trouble finding a peer group at school, here a handful of bored, borderline teen alcoholics whose social agenda consists of piling into a van and getting ripped in a local field. Anyone who grew up in such a town—and mine was in Michigan—will recognize this squad.
Also living in town is one Sue Ann Ellington (Spencer), a lonely veterinary assistant routinely chastised by an impossible to please boss (Allison Janney). Easily distracted Sue Ann, who has one of those faraway looks about her, keeps to herself and lives, alone, on the outskirts.
Things take a turn when a chance meeting in the parking lot of the local convenience store finds Sue Ann recruited by the teens to buy liquor. Initially reluctant, she conditionally agrees—as long as they come to her place, hang out in the basement and turn over their keys. No drinking and driving, and no going upstairs—that’s her private space, after all. And in a movie like this, that can mean only a few things, and none good. At least there’s pizza rolls.
For a while, Sue Ann, deemed “Ma” by the kids and assuming the role of a sort of off-kilter house mother, seems on the up and up—she forbids foul language and offers life lessons to the girls, mostly about the danger of boys, particularly Maggie’s budding boyfriend, Andy (Corey Fogelmanis). But what is Ma really up to? What’s with her endless texts? Her friend requests and video chats? And how about those bizarre mood swings? Her not-so-secret crush on Andy? How, exactly, does she know Erica and Andy’s dad (Luke Evans)? What is their deep, dark, secret? Will the sins of the fathers be revisited?
She tracks her new friends down on social media, follows them, turns up at school stocked with booze and at their suggestions remodels her party pad, the once dilapidated basement. It isn’t long before every kid in school is partying at Ma’s, and it’s win-win for a while, Sue Ann accepted by an unlikely new peer group and the kids partying away from the prying eyes of parents and police. All good, right?
Sue Ann’s game isn’t immediately clear—it takes some time for the past to reveal itself in effectively integrated flashbacks—but when the puzzle pieces come together, her motivations are anything but benevolent. Spencer has a high time concealing a sociopath beneath a kindly veneer and it’s as fun to watch her lie about a terminal illness to get back in the teens’ good graces not to mention her descent into depravity in the movie’s final third. The film’s catch-line, which has already gone viral, features Ma singing “Don’t make me drink alone!” And Spencer, working with standard material, is able to suggest the very real spoils of a life lived in isolation.
When her machinations finally unspool, the picture doesn’t skirt the implications of high school bullying and its aftershocks, nor pull punches when it comes to the merciless treatment of a lone African American student at the mercy of a rural, white school culture. And the screenplay, by Scotty Landes with an assist from Taylor, well knows that small town cliques and their prevailing histories never die, and whatever wounds Sue Ann is nursing are about to manifest.
Ensemble members Lewis, generous and warm, and Evans are superb as concerned parents who must atone for past transgressions. Lewis, especially, creates a likable woman in an unfortunate situation who knows something strange is afoot; a scene where she confronts Sue Ann in the convenience store is smart and frightening. And Evans has an effective scene in a bar that abruptly shifts from small talk to a stern warning.
MA, fun as it at times may be, is a formula, though it receives high marks for a most clever nod to Kool & The Gang at just the right moment. It’s also a formula that works because the cast sells it. It’s well-shot, well-edited, briskly paced and eschews the exploitation of a slasher picture in favor of a modestly clever character study. If you’ve seen Fatal Attraction or Single White Female (or scores of other genre films), you may think you know where MA is headed. But Spencer, who can turn on a dime from endearing to enraged, is a hoot, and makes this one enjoyable. While we know she’s up to no good, we can’t help but root for her Sue Ann—that’s a testament to Spencer’s humanity.
3 stars.
