Towing all their possessions in a U-Haul trailer, Erica (Juliette Lewis) and her daughter Maggie (Diana Silvers) pull up to their new home on a dead-end street in a one-story town. For Erica, it’s a melancholy homecoming, a return to the Midwest from California after her marriage failed and her dreams were cancelled. For Maggie, 16, it’s the unease of starting a new school. Unlike mom, she has no memories of the place and is a stranger. She will make friends easily and some of their choices will lead to disaster.
The “ma” of Ma, however, isn’t Erica but a woman Maggie and her new friends encounter outside a liquor store. They are having no luck convincing passersby to take their money and buy them some booze until Sue Ann (Octavia Spencer) ambles along. At first, Sue Ann wants no part in their get-drunk scheme, but something in them stirs a memory of her own teenage years.
Next time they meet, she buys liquor for them again and encourages the kids to do their drinking in the basement of her home at the edge of town. “It calms me so much to know you guys aren’t drinking and driving,” Sue Ann assures them. Whatever. The kids call her “the old chick”—she’s their parents’ age, after all!—but she gives them a hideaway to party. She even serves pizza rolls hot from the microwave and lets them crank the tunes to 10.
From the onset of this unconventional den mother-teen relationship, Ma shows that there’s more to Sue Ann than a perhaps misguided sense of adult responsibility over drunk driving. She checks up on “her” kids online and becomes manipulative, increasingly intrusive. Short flashbacks to the John Hughes era depict Sue Ann’s high school years. Soon, we gather that “her” kids are the children of her 1980s classmates. And Sue Ann’s high school memories aren’t fond.
Spencer gives a memorable performance. Sue Ann’s friendly mentorship, her role as party-hearty hostess in a funky town of her own creation—her knowing winks at adolescent behavior—cast sullen shadows of resentment and obsession. What happened to her in those Pretty in Pink days 30-odd years ago?
Ma becomes an edge-of-seat thriller before turning into carnage. Scotty Landes’ screenplay is smartly constructed with all the necessary foreshadows of coming twists and turns. Like a good genre picture, Ma shows (without fanfare or preaching) troubled aspects of contemporary society, including Erica’s low-wage job with continually shifting hours, the relentless tide of peer pressure that can carry away even a sensible girl like Maggie, the meaning of boundaries in a world without privacy and, of course, race. One wrong note: Sue Ann has a pretty nice house (and an unlimited budget for booze) for a woman doing drudge work at a veterinary clinic. Where’d she get all that money?
