Sometimes the most simple of films are actually the best ones. Here, if you ignore there is a little similarity or two to the classic Stephen King adaptation of 'Misery,' you have a bunch of teens who befriend an older lady when she agrees to buy them alcohol. However, they end up getting more than just a few bottles of underage grog for their troubles.
There may be nothing new with the way this film is put together, somehow everything just works. For a start, the script is great. The sort of tale where a girl moves to a new town could be riddles with all sorts of filmic cliches, yet this one doesn't go that way. There's no love triange, no bitchy cool girl or meat-headed 'jock.' What you get is a group of friends who talks to each other as if they really were friends, therefore automatically letting us - the audience - root and relate with them.Of course, I'm totally underplaying the excellent performance of Octavia Spencer as the titular 'Ma,' who offers to help these teens party with the purchase of alcohol. She steals every scene, but, despite being the 'villain' of the film, her ability to make us understand where she's coming from and how she became the way she is just makes her character more than some sort of one-dimensional masked slasher we get in so many other horror films.
Despite the story not really going in too many novel directions, I'll keep the plot vague in case you don't guess where some of it is going. However, if you want a 'horror' film that's probably more of a thriller than an outright blood-bath (although there are more than a few really grim moments that will make most men wince!) then definitely give it a go. It's got excellent performances all round, some nice tweaks that you may not see coming, quite a few digs at the drawbacks of popular culture (mainly allowing so much of your own information to be viewed online by anyone) and just the one blatant nod to 'Misery' in the form of an ornamental cat.
8/10 The Force is definitely strong with this one
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