Tear Jerker / Mama

• While it doesn't fully excuse Jeffery for killing all of those people which include his estranged wife and him planning to kill his children if Mama hadn't stopped him, it goes to show how financial strain can do a number on people.
• Towards the end, when the audience can see Mama/Edith holding the remains of her dead child. For a moment she returns to her former, human state, and begins sobbing over the baby.
• A truly heart-wrenching moment at the ending with Annabel clinging to Victoria's legs because she is too physically weak to do anything else, both of them in tears because Mama/Edith has taken Lily away.
• Mama's/Edith's story in general is heartbreaking. After giving birth to her child, presumably while or just before Edith is committed, she has her baby taken from her. She escapes the asylum, goes to the private school where the baby is being cared for by nuns, kills a nun to retrieve her daughter, and is ultimately chased to her and the baby's deaths by those seeking to prevent any harm coming to the baby. Mama spends the next several decades wandering the earth as a ghost, tormented by the loss of her baby until she discovers Victoria and Lily in the woods and takes them under her wing. Then the two of them are taken away, and she spends the majority of the movie trying to keep them. The climax has her confronted with the bones of her baby, and by the look on her face this is the closest thing she gets to a Despair Event Horizon. After all that, she's still forced to let Victoria go. Mama's had it rough.
  • The intro showing the girls being raised by Mama is a Tearjerker for the sole reason of how difficult it was. Mama loved the girls and did her best, but she's just a phantom, and a mentally unbalanced one at that. Despite her best efforts, the girls ended up regressing into animals since Mama can't meaningfully talk to them or teach them. Not to mention the drawing showing what appears to be Lily being sick, and neither Victoria nor Mama can do anything to help her.
• For that matter, Annabel's psychic dream sequence is completely heart wrenching, because the entire thing is from Mama's/Edith's point of view. Including the chase and death scenes.
  • The nun's death in particular, considering she did nothing wrong and didn't have to die for the child stolen from her arms. Considering Edith was determined to get her baby back, it ended up costing three lives.
  • More tears for the nun: the look on the poor woman's face is one of absolute terror right up to the moment that she drops out of view... and a closer analysis of the scene indicates that that terror was for the baby. This poor woman died fearing for the safety of the child Edith took — and rightfully so.
  • The part where she covers the baby's eyes before she jumps... and then she hits the branch, and the baby is gone. So much emotion from that one scene.
• Mama's treatment of Annabel during the climax. After Victoria calls her off the first time, Mama is visibly gentler in keeping Annabel away, pushing her head down and pinning her without hurting her. Assuming Victoria is translating for Mama when she asks Annabel to "sleep", this might be Mama's way of asking (rather than trying to force) Annabel not to continue interfering. She doesn't even start to look angry with Annabel until the very last time that Annabel tries to stop them, and even then, the expression looks almost maternal. This sudden shift in demeanor is likely a result of Victoria's love for Annabel softening Mama towards her, too — or perhaps Mama recognizes that Annabel, too, is acting out of genuine love for the girls.
  • More than that, even. By that point, Annabel is injured, desperate, grieving because she thinks Mama killed Luke outright. She's so hurt, she can't even crawl; she's dragging herself along the ground, to get to the girls. She can't even speak in the end, just beseechingly clutch at Victoria's robe, and her persistence is such that she's willing to keep holding on, even knowing that Mama is liable to kill her too. In that final moment, Edith wasn't just seeing that Annabel loved the girls: she was seeing that Annabel has become just like her, in her own tragic final moments and in her miserable ghostly state thereafter.
• When Victoria was able properly see Luke, she mistakes him for her daddy at first. Despite her father trying to kill her and her sister and Mama being her only parental figure for the last five years, she still is attached to her father.
• Lily leaving with Mama, and Victoria's heartbroken reaction to losing her sister.
  • "Goodbye, Mama. I love you."

---