A Review of Mārama

Mārama came onto my radar almost by accident. I think my Instagram algorithm vaguely understood that I have a penchant for horror, especially Gothic horror, and it vaguely recognized that Mārama was also Gothic horror, and so it put the official account for this film in my recommended. And just my luck, a week after, it was showing at Calgary Underground Film Festival. It was at 9:45 on a Tuesday night and I had work the next morning, but I was not deterred–I will do foolish actions for cinema.

It felt like the stars aligned for me to see this film: my friend and I circled the same city block over and over to find parking, ventured through terrifying backrooms-esque parking garages, and made it to the theatre with 15 minutes to spare. I’m so glad we did, because it was stunning.

Mārama tells the story of Mārama (also known as Mary Stephens, but I will be referring to her by her Maori name for this review) making her way through Victorian North Yorkshire on a quest to find the truth of her parentage, and what happened to her sister Te Haeata (also known as Emilia). After being dumped on the side of the road a lá Nosferatu, and a frightening encounter in a hunting hovel, she makes it to the sprawling Hawkser Manor and its surrounding estate, presided over by patriarch Nathaniel Cole.

But all is not as it seems at Hawkser, and slowly, surely, she does uncover the truth of her whakapapa (note: I am not going to italicize the Maori words here because I don’t feel like I need to, and also because I have a lot of other italicized titles and it might cause confusion. Thoughts?)–along with some horrifying secrets as well.

From here, there will be spoilers: proceed at your own risk.

Her stay at Hawkser is unwillingly prolonged when she is strongarmed into becoming the governess for Cole’s own Maori granddaughter Anne. As Mārama spends more time on the estate, she discovers all manner of desecrated artifacts, mis-worn regalia, and shocking ignorant words uttered. This culminates in a bone-chilling scene in a stolen Wharenui, where she comes to discover that her whakapapa was not lost, but forcibly taken from her by English colonizers.

This film was a powerful addition to the Gothic horror canon. In recent years, a new Gothic has emerged, exemplified by stories like Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and “Deer Lady” in Reservation Dogs–this is the post-colonial Gothic. As it turns out, abject and gut-wrenching horror is uniquely effective at exploring the continuing nightmare of colonialism. Mārama is in this tradition: it takes classic conventions from the likes of Rebecca, Haunting of Hill House, and The Yellow Wallpaper, and twists them into Stappard’s own unique Maori take on the genre. Mārama dreams of her sister in an empty room with yellow wallpaper, covered in blood; she digs through Cole’s desk and discovers a trove of old photographs, including Te Haeata in a dragging white gown; she furiously hakas at a ballroom full of of white people dressed up in Maori regalia as they perform a perverted re-enactment of a whale hunt. It may sound like Mārama is derivative (and it is, but all horror and quite frankly, all art, is derivative so who cares) but what it is really doing is offering a sort of lineage, an ancestry, of Gothic horror itself, thus presenting the idea that this horror is specific, but it is also universal: Mārama is Te Haeata is Hinemoana is Rebecca is Catherine Earnshaw, going as far back as colonialism and misogyny have existed.

I also want to particularly hand it to Ariāna Osborne for her performance; more often than not, Gothics are just as much the internal haunting of the characters as they are the external frights, and Osborne understood this very clearly. As soon as we see Mārama onscreen for the first time, Osborne tells us that there is weight on this character’s mind, using nothing but her huge brown eyes. She vacillates carefully between stoicism, secrecy, and full-blown rage; her haka is going to stick with me for a very long time. A lot of the success of Mārama is, understandably, resting on its titular character’s shoulders, and Osborne rises to this challenge, eliciting both tears and hoots of satisfaction from her audience (namely, me).

There were some less successful moments, but they were few and far between. A lot of these, as well, I don’t take huge issue with; in my mind, the good of this film far outweighs the worse parts. Still, they are worth mentioning for those who may not be as tolerant of them as I am.

The film definitely was on the slower side; a lot of the first act was arranging and explaining, which again, I don’t mind, but if you prefer a horror movie that gets right into the action immediately this may not be quite the film for you. There were also a couple of moments where I thought that, if Stappard desired, he could expand the story a little bit–I was particularly intrigued by Cole’s son and Te Haeata’s husband. We discover shortly before he is murdered that he is queer, and that not he, but Cole himself, is Anne’s biological father. The film is a bit too late revealing this, and though this film is most certainly not about the colonizer–if we have to pick, let’s focus on Mārama herself–it might have been a worthy avenue to explore how global indigenous cultures have names and stories about queerness, and by-and-large only in western colonialism was it treated as an anomaly.

Mārama is a singular, powerful addition to the Gothic canon; it takes the tropes and makes them their own, creating a nightmare bound up in colonialism, imperialism, anti-blackness, misogyny, and grief. Both the film, and the character herself, take what we know about the Gothic and show us something new about it: perhaps the doubling of Rebecca is not just about mirroring, but about the ways in which women, but especially indigenous women, are treated as interchangeable, and maybe Hill House isn’t only about trapped spirits, but spirits trapped in a home and culture imposed upon them. The film was carried through by its actors, who slowly, carefully unfolded this story for us, revealing a rotten core in the very middle. It was harrowing, make no mistake, but there is one useful purpose for it: rot becomes compost becomes new life, and Mārama also lets us know that from the rot of colonialism, native cultures have grown anew, and will continue to grow anew, long after we have finally allowed the carcass of colonialism to return to the earth.