& # 39; My & # 39; Let Octavia Spencer take something for herself: NPR

Making Octavia Spencer the villain in a horror movie is one of those ideas that only look great in retrospect. After all, Spencer's famous character is the stoical and dressed matriarch, generally serving others, and she wore her frown and warm, hearty embraces to reward glory. The Help, Fruitvale Station, Hidden,and The shape of the water… and for a while entered Typecast Valley with The hut, gifted, And so on. There was a time when it seemed right that the actress would be stuck in the roles of mother or maid.

So in My, the latest cheapo shocker from Blumhouse Productions, Spencer polishes his goodness for evil. She is still unusually hospitable and continues to stall hugs, but there is now something sinister behind generosity, a glassy look that requires different attention. And she polishes something else too. In the country of adolescents, middle-aged people are usually non-sexual entities with no body. Their best years are behind them, their present lives are remarkable only to the extent that they can be useful to teenagers. So, this woman wins the trust of a group of parents-deficient teenagers by appealing to their most stupid instincts: buying them a lot of alcohol and offering her basement squeaky like a crash pad without questions. It's exactly the antidote to the growth they all need, and it comes from the courtesy of a real grown-up.

We should be clear from the start that My This is not a particularly well done movie: it suffers from a mediocre pace, a comedy too broad, a really ugly camera work and an empty storyline . But beneath the surface, it might just be saying something, if not useful, at least not empty. The film was directed by Spencer's long-time friend, Tate Taylor, who also directed L & # 39; s helpand it's fun to think about this trash anti-prestige image as the Westyle "attached" to this piece of time too sure about race relations. Both are stories taken from the Mississippi of a woman treated as a Mammy who takes revenge against rash whites. They are told through the eyes of a white girl trying to find her own business. In reality, L & # 39; s help was arguably the most disgusting movie, with its infamous pie scene, while My only manages to bombard his gross moments from the climax to make us believe we're watching Viewed.

In this case, the role of Emma Stone returns to Diana Silvers, whose very modest high school student, Maggie, has just moved into town with her single mother (the overqualified Juliette Lewis). Maggie quickly joins a crowd of foolish revelers with names such as "Haley" and "Chaz", the kind of unattractive teens that you tend to see in the background of other movies of high school. And that's why Sue Ann de Spencer, a veterinary assistant in flower scrubs and an Anton Chigurh cup cut, can make her way so easily in their lives: these kids are just blank slates she manipulates at her will. The hunky guy really does not exist until Ma has removed his weapon and ordered him to undress for his own amusement.

Spencer's cast and the remarkable flashbacks of the 1980s in which Sue Ann is the only black girl in a sea of ​​white faces of John Hughes will open My to a critical discussion about race in horror. But the film was not built to address racial themes (Spencer said the role was written for a white woman), and instead made her psychopath a former unpopular kid for revenge. Paternal maltreatment is also treated like shop windows: a later plot directly evokes the true story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, but she does not consider everything.

Still, one should probably not expect too much from a movie that unfolds largely in a single basement. The only bigger idea My Taylor and screenwriter Scotty Landes are convinced that just seeing a drunken, neglected 47-year-old on Snapchat is frightening young people. But give them credit for allowing "Ma" to publicly covet the 17-year-old boys. Her taboo thirst sent the audience to a preview screening in nausea bouts. More? It's one of the few moments in Spencer's filmography where she took the lead and took something for herself.