NekoHomey
Purely Joyful Movie!
Chirphymium
It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
Brendon Jones
It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.
Keeley Coleman
The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;
kosmasp
What started off as a short, became a feature length movie. And Guillermo Del Toro was the one who saw the potential in the movie. In both movies so to speak. The general idea is simple and yet very horrifying. Having two children in peril will work most of the time. Shooting this like it is one take (great effects doing that and the other things in the movie) was genius too.Of course there are more takes, it's very complicated, but also very short and you get the feeling of dread and fear. Saying more about it, would spoil the "fun" you could have watching it. The good thing is, it doesn't matter if you watch this before watching the feature length movie or afterwards. The movie itself is kind of absorbed as one scene in the movie ... though it has a small difference ...
TxMike
I saw this film short as an "extra" on the DVD for the feature length movie of the same name, by the same writers. The extra, with Del Toro's introductory comments, is about 5 minutes. The short film itself is right at 3 minutes.It's really only an idea, actually. We see two small girls in a large, two-story house. The atmosphere is spooky. Then we see the ghost figure "Mama" rushing towards the girls as they run up the stairs to safety. Hopefully.Del Toro came across this short and was impressed enough to contact the writers, a brother and sister team, to see if they might write a feature length film on the same theme.And they did, the 1 hour 40 minute horror movie "Mama." Which I enjoyed, BTW, even though it is not a genre that I am usually drawn to.
gavin6942
Little Victoria (Berta Ros) is waken up by her sister Lili (Victoria Harris) who insists on leaving the house because somebody unpleasant has come back.Although I watched this through the tainted point of view of seeing the feature film first, I think I can judge and review it objectively. (At least I hope so.) In this very short film, we have two little girls scared by an unknown entity. We do get to see this "Mama" a bit, and she is indeed something to fear. I actually think the effects look far better here than they do in the full-length version.This excels as a short film because it leaves us wondering: who are these girls, what is this Mama, and where are the parents? And despite leaving us with questions, it is very self-contained. The lack of plot is actually more effective than having a plot.
Michael_Elliott
Mama (2008) *** (out of 4) Andres Muschietti's three-minute short is what helped get his 2013 film made. Fans of that film (whick I'm one of) will certainly want to watch this just to compare how the sequence here looked in the feature. What we basically have is two little girls walking around their house when they notice mama and try to get away from her. This scene was actually redone in the feature to a very good effect and considering this thing just lasts three-minutes there's really no reason to try and treat it the same as a feature. With that said, I was actually quite impressed with this short as the director at least managed to build up some tension and the pay-off was nice. I will also admit that I actually liked mama from this short better than the feature, which was good but often times relied on too much CGI. Both Victoria Harris and Berta Ros are good as the children.