Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
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.
Ma is a middling horror-thriller elevated primarily by Octavia Spencer's committed, scene-chewing performance as the unhinged Sue Ann. The plot is serviceable but predictable, hitting familiar revenge-horror beats without much subversion. Spencer brings genuine menace and pathos to a role that lesser performers would have made cartoonish, and the film earns some credit for centering a Black woman villain in a genre space that rarely does so. Cinematography is functional at best — flat and unremarkable, rarely using visual language to build sustained dread. The backstory and Munchausen-by-proxy elements offer a slightly distinctive angle on the stalker-psycho formula, but the screenplay fails to fully exploit its more interesting ideas. The ending devolves into standard slasher chaos, squandering the psychological tension built earlier.