Mārama (Ariāna Osborne) is a young school teacher who arrives in England, intent on learning the truth about her birth parents from someone who knew them.
After learning her contact has died, Mārama’s journey appears to be over.
Until the wealthy owner of the local manor (Toby Stephens) offers her a place to stay - and reveals a peculiar interest in her home country.
As Mārama is drawn deeper into the family’s world, she begins to see this home as a perverse shrine - and a link to the past she is missing…
I still get a bit of the cultural shudder when it comes to certain kinds of New Zealand films. Usually it is when it is a genre that does not have a large cultural footprint.
New Zealand has its own gothic tradition. But Mārama is going back to the birthplace of the gothic, the old English Manor.
I was first brought up on New Zealand gothic via Sam Neil’s documentary, Cinema of Unease.
Made to celebrate the centenary of cinema, it is now a signpost of a particular view of New Zealand film and media as a whole - a particular pakeha point of view, with the unease based in the uncertain relationship with a land it claims mastery over.
It is an unease based on rootlessness, and a lack of roots in Aotearoa.
Mārama is the inverse - it is based in a longer sense of history, and a deep relationship with the land and its history.
When the film explicitly references the concept of facing the past while walking into the future, I felt like applauding:
What a perfect complement to the Gothic, a genre all about the past coming back to haunt the present.
I will admit, at first I was a little weary.
The film starts out with a familiar set-up - a young woman comes to an old house and becomes a part of a wealthy family with some kind of secret.
This secret - which relates to the mystery of Mārama’s parentage - seemed fairly obvious.
That did not matter because the film’s handling of its tone, and the increasing sense of tension, made that almost irrelevant.
Ariāna Osborne’s performance as as the central character seems to be playing off the idea of the ingenue.
I only know her from her role as Tūi on the TV show Madam, but she comes across as fundamentally savvy.
There is an inherent knowingness to her performance that creates another layer of tension - Mārama is clearly not the innocent waif her hosts believe she is, and it is hard to imagine her becoming their willing pawn.
Mārama is new to the UK, but she is no stranger in a strange land - she has a familiarity with the Pakeha world and seems to be bidding her time.
She knows she is at a disadvantage, in terms of power, and some early ceding of ground does seem to align with the familiar archetype of the innocent gothic heroine.
It is this clash, between Mārama and her hosts’ perceptions of her character, which becomes the movie’s time bomb - a slow escalation of tension which culminates in a scene at a party where Mārama is forced to witness a garish, mocking portrayal of Maori culture.
It is a fantastically uneasy sequence that the filmmakers let play out. You can see our heroine’s explosion coming, but the filmmakers delay it to the last possible second, until the inevitable clash between the condescending pretension of Mārama’s hosts and her outrage.
This scene is fantastic - but the third act is where Mārama goes into the stratosphere. New Zealand movies have a hard time reaching for the primal emotions - it is rare that a movie manages to feel unsafe and disturbing.
The final reveal of Mārama’s past is a horrifying piece of Grand Guignol, made all the more disturbing by its implications:
Mārama is viewed as a possession, an extension of her (spoilers) father’s own power and ability to master and possess a faraway land.
It is a bloody, visceral take on colonisation.
It takes a while to get going, but Mārama’s increasingly sure hand with suspense, and its memorable climax are worth it. I am keen to rewatch it, and to see how it plays knowing the ending.
Worth a look.
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