MARAMA – Review by Nadine Whitey
“Walking backwards into the future.”
The antipodean Gothic is an underutilised mode of storytelling. Colonialism in all its unending brutality and othering is ripe for exploration through the haunting uncanniness of the Gothic. Aotearoa/New Zealand director Taratoa Stappard proves how powerful and indelible the Gothic can be through his stunning Mārama; a film that simultaneously wears the skin of Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’ corrective text The Wide Sargasso Sea while pushing the boundaries of domestic and social horror.
Set in Yorkshire in 1859 Mārama is immediately disquieting. A young Māori woman is covered in blood and screaming in what looks like a locked room. From that scream comes a song, a fire, and an inverted shoreline with a solitary figure in shadow. The echoes of those images signal that for the young woman travelling in a coach (and unceremoniously ejected from it) something is hanging over her. Mary Stevens (Ariāna Osborne) has spent weeks at sea coming from her home in New Zealand to meet a man who wrote that he could tell her about her birth family.
Mary travels on foot to the cottage of her correspondent to find that it is empty. A servant from the manor house finds her and guides her to Hawkser owned by a former whaler turned gentry. The house is cluttered with images and souvenirs of Mary’s homeland as the owner, Sir Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens) made his fortune there. Cole himself was an orphan in Sydney before he made his money in Aotearoa. A period in his life which defined him and led to an obsessional ownership of all he found in the colony.
Nathaniel Cole surprises the young schoolteacher with his skill speaking te reo and his knowledge of her culture. Indeed, he is particularly solicitous with Mary whose difficult journey from Wellington to Whitby was for the sole purpose of finding her parentage. Cole claims that he is sympathetic to the Māori, and that Mary from a people he considers “magnificent specimens” and suggests she would serve wonderfully as a governess for his granddaughter Anne (Evelyn Towersy), a bright nine-year-old whose father is a drunkard incapable of raising her.
Hawkser Manor is surprising for Mary, especially the garden which boasts a wharepuni (a Māori ancestor house). There is also something else, something hiding below the fetishisation of her culture – something that sends Mary dark visions of death and doppelgängers. Mary also has to contend with the housemaid Peggy (Umi Myers) another woman of colour who resents the special treatment the master seems to be bestowing on Mary. There’s also the rough “Uncle” Jack Fenton (Erroll Shand) a loutish companion of Cole’s who has traditional Māori facial tattoos and an appetite for open brutality.
Nathaniel Cole reveals that Mary had a sister, a twin, whom he adopted and raised as his own and is now deceased. Emilia grew alongside his son Arthur (Jordon Mooney) and they married. Anne is Emilia’s daughter making her Mary’s blood family. Mary knows that there is more to be uncovered especially relating to her sister and mother.
Mārama uses almost every trope in the Gothic playbook which in other hands and with a lesser purpose would be overkill. Hauntings, infanticide, incest, twins, secret passages, shameful family secrets, visions, displacement, and putrefying decadence set the film’s mood, but these trappings never overwhelm the crux of the horror – the venality and cruelty of the colonial belief that ownership extends to humans.
Taratoa Stappard crafts a moody and spellbinding tale of revenge and reclamation. Mary (or her true name Mārama) is a woman who will not give up her mana (dignity and standing), nor will she allow herself to be owned or used by any man. A great evil must be settled for Mārama and her family to be able to face the future.
Ariāna Osborne is a compelling screen presence, her strength and dignity as the Gothic heroine is born from her innate assuredness. Toby Stephens, who played Rochester at one time, is an old hand with this kind of storytelling and provides a formidable antagonist in the gloomy candlelit halls of his house of lies.
Mārama is a true genre gem with an ever-relevant focus on the violence of colonialism and the overarching reach of greedy and insatiable men who twist legacy. Imaginative and vivid with a keen sense of the works that came before it, Mārama does what it intends to with perfection.
