Mārama

For all its real-world anguish and fictional dread, Mārama never collapses beneath the weight of its own seriousness. Stappard understands that catharsis matters too, and the film’s conclusion is exhilarating.

For all its real-world anguish and fictional dread, Mārama never collapses beneath the weight of its own seriousness. Stappard understands that catharsis matters too, and the film’s conclusion is exhilarating.

Neither exactly a horror movie nor a costume drama, Mārama stakes out its original narrative ground as a kind of cathartic pageant or imaginary exorcism of history’s ghosts.

Mārama is arguably at its most effective as a political text when it isn’t trying so hard to be part of the heritage that includes Hitchcock’s Rebecca and del Toro’s Crimson Peak.

The fury of Osborne’s performance, nonetheless, keeps “Mārama” a worthy anti-colonialist statement that harnesses the symbolic virtues of genre cinema for its understandably virulent tone.