TIFF 50: "Mārama" serves Gothic horror with an anticolonial twist

by Cláudio Alves

Before even its company credits unfold on screen, Mārama hits the audience with a smash of historical context. A short text positions the narrative to come within the legacy of colonialism in Aoteaora, renamed New Zealand by its invaders. Specifically, it warns of the desecration of Māori culture and the violence that persists to this day, concluding with a statement that might as well stand for the film's thesis: "To move into our future we must understand our past." Such sentiment underpins much of contemporary anticolonial art, and Mārama makes for a particularly curious example, as it explores the subject by appealing to genre precepts, moving away from didacticism toward the pulpy visceral. 

For his feature directorial debut, Taratoa Stappard has imagined a Gothic story cum revenge fantasy, where a Māori woman travels across the globe to Victorian England and seeks justice for what was done to her, her family, her people…

A tale of two lands in conflict with one another, at a political, cultural, even spiritual level, Mārama strikes an audiovisual chord of dissonance early on. Through Gin Leone's cinematography and a flurry of dissolves by editor Dan Kircher, Stappard presents a quasi-impressionistic prologue made of mad eyes and screams, raging fire and crashing water. It's a tone poem in miniature, closing on an inverted waterfront vista, the waves up above and the dusky sky below, a woman standing upside down in a picture of fundamental wrongness. What could have been a tableau that pleased the viewer with postcard prettiness unsettles instead.

And then, separated by a title card drop, the screen rights itself, but lets the wrongness remain. From New Zealand to North Yorkshire, silvery night to the lead-white of British daytime, a world roaring with life to another choking to death. The greenery even looks dry under the camera's dispassionate gaze, a horse-pulled carriage like an ink-dipped pen drawing a black smudge across its expanse. Cinema like this will always have a special place in my heart, those movies that can communicate in purely aesthetic terms, sight and sound as the vehicle to get under the spectator's skin, into their consciousness.

If Mārama worked exclusively on these terms, you wouldn't find me complaining. But no, for all his ingenuity, Stappard has a more conventional approach in mind. Out of the carriage comes Mary Stevens, a young Māori teacher summoned there by a man who seems to have perished before she arrived. Alone in 1859 England, she insists on keeping faithful to her search for family truths, needing answers to long-held questions. There's also her sister to consider. She should be here, somewhere in this foreign land. It comes as no surprise that, at the first offer of accommodation and work, Mary accepts, becoming a governess to Sir Nathaniel Cole's ward.

Yet, his benevolence doesn't feel like generosity. Instead, it tastes of calculation and ulterior motives, especially as everything appears to be already in place to welcome the surprise guest into the depths of Hawkser Manor. In other words, it's a sinister spin on Jane Eyre that recalls what Jacques Tourneur tried with 1943's I Walked with a Zombie. Only, Stappard isn't interested in looking at a colonial exoticized other through the prism of an imperialist power eating itself alive like that classic Hollywood horror. If anything, he inverts the dynamic and later hints at a more barbarous Bluebeard. Or a thornier Ready or Not for a more explicit and modern reference.

Consider the scenery as well, so typical of British period dramas. Those old houses built by working-class and infused by colonized people's blood that we've been passively enjoying for eons are here perused as if the work of an alien monstrosity. The walls are dark, rooms full of corners that vanish into voids, floor shining slippery, the furniture so polished it whispers warnings against those who contemplate touching it. Māori artifacts, masks and even a cabin, line shelves and ornament the gardens. They're a thief's bounty proudly displayed as symbol of his magnanimous appreciation for the same communities his enterprise has exploited. But of course, the display is a lie like most of what comes out of Cole's mouth. 

Perhaps he believes some of it, but imperialists are masters at self-reflectively lying about their own kindness. They might even convince themselves they love those they keep in bondage. Mary, whose true name is Mārama, sees through it all, recognizing the emptiness in these aristocratic creature comforts and the obscenity of Cole's false hospitality. How could she not? Even before a masque in honor of James Cook ends in disaster, the film overflows disquiet. The text is never less than blunt, but, again, you could mute the dialogue and still understand Mary's unrest and humiliation. Her rage is palpable, surging through Ariāna Osborne's performance like lava rising up a volcano's veins, eager to erupt and set the fire to the world.

Watching her perform a furious haka against a white audience is catharsis until it's not, ruined by her oppressor's delight in the customs of the putative uncivilized. No matter, real catharsis will come soon enough, bloody and unforgiving. Beyond performance, the audiovisual strategies are similarly unrelenting. They never let one ease themselves into the experience of watching Mārama. Editing patterns can fall into cliché, yet they're suitably spiky, the score a migraine made from groaning cellos, the mix a vice grip getting tighter and tighter as it goes. And like any ghost story of the screen, cinematography is of paramount importance, doing way more than just that landscape contrast at the opening.

Inside the manor, Leone goes wild with the possibilities of digital film as applied to a place that's murky by design, claustrophobic and bottomless in paradoxical tandem. Usually, I abhor the smoothness of the medium, finding it sterile, prone to making people look embalmed and wax-like, light too sharp and clean and muffled, darkness too poreless. Mārama contradicts none of this, preferring to lean into the "defects" and weaponize what it can. In that regard, it does what horror movies do best, twisting film form into a tool for dissection. Both of its subjects and the audience, the culture, the society that produced such nightmares and bore them on the silver screen for all to see and shudder.

Mārama had its world premiere in the Discovery section at TIFF 50. It'll next screen at Fantastic Fest and the Chicago International Film Festival.