Mamochka

There is a kind of dread that has nothing to do with things that move in the dark. It is the dread of inheriting a piece of jewelry, or in this case, a doll arriving at your door. The film Vilan Trub’s Mamochka understands this, at least in its better moments, which makes its overall effect of combining the Abigail franchise, The Omen, Hauser’s Memory, and Ira Levin’s superb book The Boys from Brazil into something frustrating to watch.

Opening is elegantly economical. Mark, Jane, and their young son Brian return from the funeral of Jane’s mother carrying a small box containing a doll inside. This doll doesn’t lunge, sneak around or change expression; it simply is, which is a superb choice for this story.

When Mark discovers the doll, or the Mamochka, which is a Russian/Slavic term for “Mama” or “Mommy,” it makes it all the more puzzling for a film choice later on concerning the use of the Nazi song “Horst Wessel Lied.”  The doll in question was manufactured in a Nazi factory during the war, an object with no auction house record, no clean paper trail, something that existed outside the commerce of civilization. The film pivots into interesting territory. The horror here isn’t supernatural but historical, much like the human skin lampshades at Buchenwald today.  Evil encoded into an object, making history’s worst atrocities, might travel through time not as memory but as a transferable contagion.

“The doll in question was manufactured in a Nazi factory during the war…”

Stanley Trub is likely a relation to the  Director, as they have the same last name. The young boy Brian is the film’s most natural presence. His performance is authentic, his laughter, and his expressions, which the adult cast only occasionally matches. Proving once again the W.C Fields saying “Never work with children or animals’ is right again, as seen in the scene.

A series of deaths happens, like the suicide of the amorous Sarah, who is Brian’s babysitter, with the underused   Saidie Stone in the role, Maya Murphy playing Brian’s mother Jane, in an odd relationship with Mark, so this is not your usual happy family disrupted by an evil presence.  Jane, as written and performed, exists in frustration that never deepens into a full human being. It comes close when chatting with a joint-smoking neighbour of Brian’s babysitter at night.