Bryan Miller
Taratoa Stappard’s debut feature, Marama, opens with a shot of lead actress Ariana Osborne trembling—in what? Fury, fear, or something else?—iwhile blood streaks down her chin. The configuration of the gore evokes the moko kauae, the traditional chin tattoo used to convey the ancestry of Maori women, the indigenous people of New Zealand. It’s a loaded image and a concise thesis statement for a Gothic horror movie about bloodlines, heritage, and the legacy of desecration of the Maori culture at the hands of European colonizers.
Osborne plays Mary, a Maori adopted by an Englishman living in New Zealand. She’s summoned from New Zealand to England by a letter from a man who claims to know the details of her parentage. Mary makes the months-long trip only to discover the man has recently died, although his friend, the English lord Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens), offers her a job as his daughter’s governess. The first rule of Gothic horror: Never take a job as a governess, especially not at an isolated manor. That’s a doomed occupation going all the way back to The Turn of the Screw.
It turns out Nathaniel has more than a passing interest in Maori culture. He’s as quick to extol their virtues as Bradley Whitford’s character was Obama’s in Get Out, which is a helpful point of reference here. Nathaniel’s stately manor is appointed throughout with Maori art and artifacts, and a hedgerow conceals a traditional Maori dwelling, a Wharenui, expropriated from New Zealand and reconstructed in his own back yard.
Mary is immediately suspicious. Nathaniel’s evasive responses, his obsession with her cultural heritage, and the birthmark on his daughter’s arm that matches Mary’s own all suggest some grander conspiracy. And, yep, there is, one that plays out pretty directly over the course of the taut 90-minute running time.
The general trajectory of Marama is straightforward, which isn’t necessarily a hinderance. The real shortcoming is the way Stappard doles out information in a barrage of dream sequences and hallucinations, which provide the jump scares. It’s frustrating because it deprives Mary of her protagonist-ly obligation of self discovery. The information just washes over her in fits and starts, regardless of any action she does or doesn’t take. This is explained away later in a throwaway line about her being descended from a seer, which is fair play in a movie with supernatural overtones, but it’s pretty narratively unsatisfying.
Though Marama never even attempts broader innovations in the realm of the gothic, it absolutely thrives in the specific depictions of Maori culture and its mostly disastrous collisions with British culture. “Disastrous collisions with British culture” doesn’t sound unique—that’s pretty much the story of the 18th and 19th centuries—but the particulars of the effect the European colonizers on the more equitable Maori culture is especially significant to women, and that gender dynamic plays out here.
If the dream sequences and jump scares are a bit programmatic, Stappard more than makes up for it when Marama gets down to business in the final half hour. The central setpiece of the film is bound to be one of the year’s most memorable horror sequences. Nathaniel hosts a party, attended by various white friends clad in Maori attire and gussied up in cartoonish drag parodies of Maori women. What begins as the British version of the worst frat-house Halloween party of all time descends into Boschean havoc when Nathaniel’s right-hand man, Jack, (Errols Shand) traipses in dressed as a triumphant Captain James Cook. Depraved sailor Jack himself has liberally taken from Maori culture, including the Ta Moka, the distinctive facial tattooing, so that his drunken turn as a lecherous Cook marked up with Maori iconography becomes the demon spirit of appropriation. Mary’s response is equally harrowing.
That final half hour moves from the spooky to the absolutely brutal, earning the trigger-warning title card that accompanied the opening credits. These aren’t just horror movie machinations but a very real depiction of the ravages of colonization, tinged with supernaturalism but all too accurate in their raw savagery.
It’s a topic near to Stappard, who is himself born from both Maori and British heritage, and his themes are deeply felt. He’s aided by some superb actors, most notably Ariana Osborne, who is herself Maori, and Shand, who has a ghastly gravitas from the moment he stops onto the screen. Marama may begin as an elegantly crafted if slightly familiar gothic tale, but by its conclusion it reveals itself to be something far more personal and singular in its depiction of historical horrors.
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