Everyone seems to relish injecting others with hypodermics during madness caused by dreams and hallucinations. The Doll as the focal point is not made clear, even when a medium, Ethelinda (Jackie Gugino), is called in with some unexpected results.
Mark, played by Alexander Kollar, unravels with reasonable conviction as his descent into obsession with Second War History looks like a man who thinks he is solving a mystery while the mystery is solving him. The dialogue, in these moments, seems natural and real, even if they like to use the F bomb, which gives it a contrived sound. People talking around fear rather than at it, confronting it, is one of the things that holds the film back.
The supporting characterization — most notably a mysterious delivery man (Dino Castelli )of unclear Italian or spectral origin drifts through the narrative without resolution, the kind of ambiguity like the cowboy in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or early Dario Argento film would be cosmically weighted, yet here it simply feels forgotten.
“The Nazi history thread, which promised to anchor the film’s horror in something morally serious it simply stops.”
More damaging still is the film’s structural dissolution in its final act. Mamochka accumulates atmosphere with genuine skill with the 3 AM awakenings, the time-loop disorientation, the naked figure at the refrigerator that belongs in a much stranger film than this one, yet never has meaning. At ninety-six minutes, the credits arrive less like a conclusion than an interruption. The Nazi history thread, which promised to anchor the film’s horror in something morally serious, simply stops.
The filmmakers’ decision to incorporate the Horst Wessel Lied, which was one of the defining anthems of the Nazi Party, was banned in Germany and several other countries for its role in promoting hatred and genocide, and this is where Mamochka most seriously betrays its own ambitions. That the song exists in the public domain yet free does not mean wise, being deemed poor taste and deploying it as atmospheric texture rather than doing the harder creative work of original sound design, trivializes the very history the film claims to interrogate.
Mamochka is worth your time and attention as a work in progress. It points toward a talent that, given tighter construction, focuses a braver follow-through and a more rigorous moral compass for such a weighty subject matter.
"…Mamochka accumulates atmosphere with genuine skill..."
