Ma Parent Guide

Erica (Juliette Lewis) and her daughter Maggie Thompson (Diana Silvers) have moved from California back to Erica’s hometown in Ohio. Maggie manages to make some friends, but things go downhill when she tries to get adults to bootleg liquor for them. One such adult, Sue Ann (Octavia Spencer), offers her basement as a drinking spot so the teens won’t drive under the influence. Soon, Sue Ann - who now insists on being called Ma - is hosting teenagers from all over the county to get drunk in her basement. But there’s a rule: never go upstairs. When Maggie breaks that rule, things start to unravel pretty quickly, and Ma suddenly seems less friendly…

I’m going to be blunt. This movie is terrible. Content issues aside (and I’ll get there later), the filmmaking is a disaster. This production can’t even come up with a consistent tone. Sometimes it feels like it’s trying to be a raunchy teen comedy about a rag-tag group of friends trying to get all liquored up in a dead-end small town. Other times, it feels like a sloppy, poorly executed thriller, and still other times, it turns into a bad wannabe slasher horror flick. It spends its interminable hour and half run time bouncing from genre to genre like a ping pong ball in a dryer.

Octavia Spencer is a talented performer and is clearly trying her best, but with the tonal confusion her performance loses a lot of authenticity. Any depth to her character is further damaged by allusions to her backstory, which involves a traumatic sexual assault and a socially isolated high school experience. And this is where the movie goes from bad to terrible. Portraying victims of bullying and sexual assault as psychotic monsters is not only inaccurate, it’s insulting and harmful to real life victims. With this level of toxically stupid screenwriting, it’s not surprising that even a powerhouse actress like Octavia Spencer can’t save the film. (Although I have to wonder why she would even try….)

As if the script weren’t bad enough, Ma presents a cornucopia of content concerns. The plot is centered around underage drinking and features teens binge drinking to the point of unconsciousness as well as vaping and using pot. This alone would make this film unsuitable for teen viewing. But there is also excessive sexual content, including nudity, a brief scene of a woman grabbing male genitalia, and graphic discussion of a sexual act we can’t describe on a family website. The movie features extreme violent content, including a scene where someone’s mouth is sewn shut and another where a character is tortured and is threatened with genital mutilation. And to make things worse - yes, it’s possible - the movie is chock full of profanity, including frequent use of the sexual expletive. My only regret in grading this film is that our web software doesn’t allow me to give it an “F” – “D” is as low as I can go.

If Ma had moderated its content issues and had managed to be scary or entertaining, then maybe I might have been able to cautiously recommend it to genre fans with nothing better to do, but in this case, I’d recommend finding something else to do. Anything. Clean your basement, paint your house, watch your grass grow, alphabetize your bookshelf, just don’t see Ma. If housework doesn’t appeal to you, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is in theaters right now, and that’s two hours of non-stop fun. You can thank me for saving you from Ma’s unrelenting boredom later.