Crew
Director/Screenplay – Taratoa Stappard, Producers – Sharlene George, Rouzie Hassanova & Rickylee Russell-Waipuka, Photography – Gin Loane, Music – Karl Sölve Steven & Rob Thorne, Visual Effects Supervisor – Brenton Cumberpatch, Visual Effects – Masters of Reality (Supervisor – Caleb Thompson), Special Effects Supervisor – Ryan Verrall, Makeup/Prosthetic Designer – Stef Knight, Production Design – Nick Williams. Production Company – Sweetshop Entertainment/MPI Media Group/The New Zealand Film Commission/NZ On Air.
Cast
Ariana Osborne (Mary Stevens/Marama), Toby Stephens (Nathaniel Cole), Umi Myers (Peggy), Errol Shand (Jack Fenton), Evelyn Towersey (Anne Cole/Anahera), Jordon Mooney (Arthur Cole), Miki Te Rauhi Daniels (Hinemoana), Turia Schmidt Peke (Arorangi)
Plot
In 1859, Marama or Mary Stevens, a Māori girl of mixed heritage, arrives in England from New Zealand, having received a letter from the British father she never knew. She arrives at the estate of Nathaniel Cole who informs Mary that her father is dead. Nathaniel has a love of Māori culture and welcomes Mary in, offering her a job as governess to his daughter Anne. However, as Mary settles into the estate, she finds there are disturbing secrets about her past and the twin sister she never knew.
Marama was a debut feature for New Zealand director Taratoa Stappard who has been making short films since 1996. Stappard is, like Marama the protagonist of the film, of mixed Māori and British parentage. The film played at a number of international film festivals, winning a Grand Jury Prize at the Seattle International Film Festival before being released to the US Shudder horror network.
Marama switched me off from about the opening title card where it announces that the film is a statement against colonial oppression. Now, New Zealand’s legacy of colonialism – where the English settlers who arrived from around the 1840s onwards treated the native Māori as second class citizens – is a serious and divisive issue and there are quite a number of things I could say on the topic. However, announcing the film’s statement before it even begins seems a move that leaves Marama in danger of tripping over its own feet out of the starting gate. It is a film loudly declaring the message it wants to convey. Firstly, I have zero interest in watching a film to be lectured at. More to the point, telling an audience what a film is about even before it starts seems a failure of intent – a good film should dramatically illustrate its points, should make you feel emotion about the issues involved, not list them in bullet points so that everybody in the audience gets them loud and clear.
What I did like a good deal about Marama was Taratoa Stappard’s direction and the visual design scheme. The world of Toby Stephens’ mansion is designed in deep, dark wood and with black furniture. Almost everybody wears black clothing apart from Ariana Osborne who switches to a striking red full-length Victorian dress part way through. The effect is visually oppressive. And added to that is a heavy, overbearing and frequently menacing score. The film is almost all brooding atmosphere –you cannot fault Taratoa Stappard on these grounds.
On the other hand, the proceedings are on the slow side and we are never given many clues as to what is going on. Usually in a film by at least halfway through, I can pick what type of capsule label I am going to put on it – I was thinking ‘haunted house’, ‘Māori curse’ or ‘sinister big house.’ (One of the posters lists it as “A Māori Gothic Story of Retribution”, which hits the nail perfectly). However, I still had no real clues what the film was about until right at the end (and then I don’t like labelling a film in a way that gives away its twists). There is a number of flashbacks and talk about Marama’s twin sister, Toby Stephens’ obsession with Māori culture and apparent visions where Marama meets her mother, but these are characters that seem to have motivations and operate by actions that are never communicated to the viewer.
The other issue might be that as the lead actress Ariana Osborne is all tight and controlled restraint, before erupting into anger near the end. Unfortunately, as a protagonist, it is something that leaves Marama closed off and even unsympathetic. I am not sure if the issue here is the film’s failure to handle its lead character or simply that Ariana herself is too stiff and reserved as an actress.
The plot feels like it has been assembled from other familiar works. The girl going to the house and being hired as governess has heavy overtones of Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw (1898), which has been multiply filmed as The Innocents (1961), The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) and one New Zealand-made production The Turn of the Screw (2020), among others. The young woman visiting the big forbidden mansion has been a Gothic trope ever since Jane Eye (1847). What the story resembles if you put aside the Māori cultural elements and boil it down to its basics is a variant on The Turn of the Screw and a twist at the end that turns it into something like the fairytale Bluebeard – see Bluebeard (1972) and Bluebeard (2009). Certainly, this latter takes a full-on dive into horror, which the rest of the film has been circling around, in the last few minutes.
I don’t want to get into cultural criticism of Marama – I suspect that Taratoa Stappard and I have differing views on the whole colonial argument, which I am prepared to argue was more of a two-way street than he is. The one issue I will raise is this. He makes a big thing throughout how horrible it was that Ariana Osborne lost her family, was stripped of her culture and forced to take an English name Mary rather than her real name Marama and (in the end it is revealed) how her family was murdered. The film also reaches an ending where Marama adopts the young half-Māori, half-white girl Anne and gives her a Māori name. There seems a gaping double standard to this that I am not sure Stappard is aware of – one where it is seen as horrendous for Ariana’s Marama to have her culture stripped, her family murdered and given an English name but when the coin is reversed it suddenly becomes a good thing when Anne is given a Māori name, has her family murdered and is taken off to be raised in Māori ways. I am at a loss to understand why this is seen as a massive crime when it happens to a Māori girl but is seen as a positive uplifting ending when exactly the same enforced cultural assimilation happens to a young girl who was raised amid British culture.
Trailer here