Ma
2019 · Directed by Tate Taylor
Original language: English
- horror
- thriller
The story
Sue Ann is a loner who keeps to herself in her quiet Ohio town. One day, she is asked by Maggie, a new teenager in town, to buy some booze for her and her friends, and Sue Ann sees the chance to make some unsuspecting, if younger, friends of her own.
What it’s like
Bright, sun-washed Midwestern summer daylight, with lawns, backyard cookouts, and a suburban house that looks wholesome until it doesn't. The camera stays close and watchful, and the mood shifts from easy, sticky-warm sociability to a tightening dread as a lonely woman's hospitality curdles. Pacing starts loose and then ratchets steadily, with its menace built more from unsettling social stillness than from jump scares. The tone is sun-bleached unease: cheerful surfaces over something cold, with the most disturbing moments arriving in ordinary rooms. Intensity is high. It includes kidnapping, underage drinking, manipulation, and violence, with brief but sharp stabbing and a grim, mean-spirited edge throughout, so it is not gentle. It suits viewers who enjoy psychological thrillers with a strong central performance and a wrong-footed sense of safety, watched late at night rather than as background.
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