Critic Reviews

Gripping, intriguing, and well-paced, Mary overcomes most of the issues with its overwritten script to emerge as a serviceable entry in the genre’s canon. Sure, the film lists from time to time, but it always manages to right itself when it matters.

When it comes to waterborne movies, Wolfgang Petersen’s "The Perfect Storm" (not a horror film) is more terrifying than Mary.

The idea of this boat as a last-ditch play to save a marriage is fine as an inciting incident, but it ends up steering the story way too much. Oldman and Mortimer play the drama in “Mary” well. Too bad they don’t get much chance to play the horror.

With the filmmakers unwilling to explore a kinky, psychosexual bond between a man and his demonic lady ghost-boat, Mary comes to feel as if lacks a through line, collapsing into a series of disconnected horror-movie beats.

Michael Goi, serving as both director and director of photography, does a better job placing the camera around the claustrophobic location than he does exploring the depths of his actors.

Unfortunately, Mary's concept - and it's a good one! - doesn't blossom into the truly spooky, the truly eerie, even though it's given countless chances to do so.

Beyond de rigueur jump scares, Mary has little real atmosphere or suspense, and that is at least partly due to the fact that its supernatural force is so generically ill-defined.

Narrative ellipses and a slew of visual clichés — like vague shapes, ghostly footprints and disorienting flashes of light — make Mary (the name shared by the ship and the couple’s younger daughter) a particularly unsatisfying possession yarn.

It would, after all, take a sleuth of Hercule Poirot-like talents to discern what attracted these supremely talented (not to mention, in the case of one of them, Oscar-winning) thespians to such lame, cliched material.

Director Michael Goi is big on jump shocks that get increasingly tiresome.