Mama (2013)

Two small girls are left in a forest cabin after their father's breakdown, survive five years on whatever a possessive spirit provides, and are recovered feral, bespectacled, and only partly housebroken. Jessica Chastain plays Annabel, a bassist who inherits the children when their uncle lands in a coma, and who spends the second act negotiating with a ghost over custody. Andy Muschietti's 2013 debut, expanded from his own short film with Guillermo del Toro's name on the poster and moths on the windowsill, is competently frightening and entirely indifferent to the cultural questions of the present moment.

A census of the film's social content returns very little. The 2008 financial crisis serves only to explain why a stockbroker murders his colleagues, which is motive, not argument. The feral children come out of the Gothic cupboard, not from any contemporary conversation about development or diagnosis. Edith Brennan, the asylum patient, is invented folklore about maternal grief, staged as a ghost story instead of a case study. Nobody lectures. Nobody explains what the audience ought to feel about markets, bodies, or the weather. The camera follows a woman through a dark hallway and lets a shadow do the rest.

The one item of mild interest is the film's emotional architecture. Annabel is a reluctant mother, and the ghost is a mother who will not let go, which places a woman at each pole and makes maternal love itself the monster. That is a horror motif and nothing more, though a more eager production might have converted it into a thesis. Chastain, frayed and unglamorous, holds the whole contraption together. The result is an efficient, unsanctimonious scare machine, and our instruments, calibrated for a noisier decade, register almost nothing.