MA – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

The cinematic efforts of men — here, director Tate Taylor (The Girl on the Train) and screenwriter Scotty Landes, a TV writer making his feature debut — to delve into the inner lives of women continue to fail abysmally, in particularly horrific manner with Ma, a disgraceful waste of the brilliant Octavia Spencer. She deserves so much better than this bargain-bin cockadoodie shadow of a pseudo-Misery wannabe. I console myself with the fact that she was probably at least paid well.

In a small American town, where everyone knows everybody’s business except when convenient to the plot that they don’t, lonely Sue Ann (Spencer) insinuates herself into the lives of local high-schoolers by buying them booze and letting them use her basement as a party den. And then she rapidly turns on these kids in dumb, schlocky ways that anyone who has seen a horror movie before would have clocked the moment she showed them into her serial-killer-lair basement. Except it all enjoys so little psychological rationale on Sue Ann’s part that I guess that’s supposed to make her behavior “surprising” and “suspenseful”? Continue reading…