When orphaned Māori woman Mary (Ariāna Osborne) travels to Victorian England in the 1800s to uncover the identities of the parents she never knew, she instead unearths heinous secrets with far-reaching implications for her family tree. Mārama, the New Zealand gothic horror film from director Taratoa Stappard, folds cultural appropriation and colonial violence into a fairly familiar revenge-horror framework, but its cultural specificity – including one well-placed haka – gives the film some much-needed bite. Though more atmospheric than genuinely scary, Stappard’s handsomely mounted production is fueled by a clear-eyed rage against colonialism’s long shadow: the families torn apart, the generational trauma left in its wake, and the ancestral lands carved up, stolen, and commodified into souvenirs for empire.
CONCLUSION: Taratoa Stappard filters a familiar gothic horror story through a pointed Māori cultural lens with Mārama, a feature whose rage-fueled subtext proves more compelling than its genre mechanics.
B-
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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