BEFORE YOU GO SEE “VICTORIAN PSYCHO”, PLEASE ADD THE ANTI-COLONIAL REVENGE GOTHIC “MĀRAMA” TO YOUR WATCHLIST

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6 min read

I'm always going to have time for a good revenge story, especially when the person seeking it has every reason to be upset. And while Hollywood has given us no shortage of stories about ghosts, curses, and things that go bump in the night, I'm especially interested in the ones that have a little more to say about who, exactly, deserves to be haunted. Mārama, the Māori gothic horror film from writer-director Taratoa Stappard, is very much that kind of Gothic movie.

You know the setup: an orphaned young woman, a sprawling country estate, a wealthy man who's a little too eager to welcome her into his home. There are gorgeous dresses, family secrets, and enough red flags to decorate the entire manor.

What makes Mārama such an interesting watch, though, is that beneath all the supernatural dread and Victorian skullduggery is a story about history, identity, and the consequences of treating other people's heritage as your personal property. It's a revenge story, sure, but one with considerably more on its mind than settling a score.

So if you're looking forward to Victorian Psycho, hitting theaters November 13, there's a Māori Gothic heroine you really ought to meet first.

*SOME SPOILERS FOR MĀRAMA FROM THIS POINT

We walk backwards into the future.

It's 1859, and in typical Gothic fashion, Mārama (Ariāna Osborne), a young Māori woman going by the Anglicized name Mary Stephens, accepts a mysterious invitation to visit rural Yorkshire. Orphaned as a baby, she knows almost nothing about her family. But a man named Thomas Boyd claims he can finally give her some answers.

Of course, by the time Mary arrives, the man who sent for her has suspiciously died. Hmm…

With her one lead gone, Mary's search for answers brings her to Hawsker Manor, the sprawling estate of Sir Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens). Nathaniel made his fortune whaling in the South Seas, and he's almost aggressively welcoming. He speaks Māori, seems delighted to meet her, and just happens to need a governess for his granddaughter, Anne (Evelyn Towersey), right when Mary needs somewhere to stay. So the offer is tempting. Even if the whole situation has please don't trust this man written all over it.

Mary accepts the job, giving her plenty of time to get acquainted with Nathaniel's rather peculiar household. For starters, the man's essentially turned his home into a private collection of Māori culture. Artifacts are everywhere. And he's even had a wharenui, a traditional Māori meeting house, shipped from New Zealand and rebuilt in his garden. Nathaniel is only too pleased to show it all off. Mary, meanwhile, is wondering why a clear colonizer expects her to be impressed.

But Mary's got bigger problems. Strange women keep appearing to her in visions, showing her fragments of lives she doesn't recognize. And just as she's beginning to question what she's walked into, Nathaniel reveals that she had a twin sister named Emilia.

According to Nathaniel, Emilia was adopted by his family and grew up at Hawsker where she eventually married his son Arthur (Jordan Mooney). The couple had a daughter, Anne, before Emilia died. Which means Mary's unknowingly spent her time looking after her own niece in the house where her long-lost sister lived. Convenient man, that Nathaniel.

The more Mary tries to piece together Emilia's life, however, the less Nathaniel's story makes sense. A photograph suggests Emilia was pregnant far more recently than his version of events would allow. Arthur, supposedly a grieving widower, drinks like a fish and seems terrified of his own shadow. Even Peggy (Umi Myers), the housemaid who's been chilly toward Mary since her arrival, seems to be keeping something from her. For a man so eager to tell Mary about her family, Nathaniel seems remarkably committed to telling only the parts that make him look good.

And if Mary needed another reason to distrust him, Nathaniel's birthday party provides one in spectacular fashion.

Among his guests is an old friend named Jack Fenton (Erroll Shand), a man sporting appropriated Māori facial tattoos who apparently thinks mocking Māori culture and the violence inflicted on Māori women makes for excellent party entertainment. Another man even comes in wearing a cardboard cutout of a whale for partygoers to kill. Very Moby-Dick kink-core.

The guests find this all hilarious. Mary, dressed in a magnificent, assimilation-approved red gown, has had enough. She rises and responds with a haka, a Māori performance of chanting and powerful, rhythmic movements often used to issue a challenge. She's furious. But the guests, convinced it's part of the fun, applaud in delight.

I wanted to chuck my teacup.

By this point, Mary definitely knows there's something deeply wrong with Nathaniel and his friends. But the women appearing in her visions have been trying to warn her about something far worse than a room full of racist aristocrats. As the pieces of her family's history finally come together, Mary learns that Nathaniel's connection to her goes much deeper than he's admitted.

Turns out, he murdered her grandmother Arorangi and her mother Hinemoana. He took Emilia from her family, leaving Mary behind as an infant. Boyd, the very man who'd invited her to England, was the one who saved her. And, and Nathaniel isn't merely the man responsible for destroying her family. He's Mary's biological father.

The truth about Emilia is even more horrifying. Nathaniel sexually abused both Mary's mother and Emilia, whom he'd raised while pretending she was his adopted daughter. Emilia's marriage to Arthur was a cover for Nathaniel's abuse, and little Anne is actually his child, too. That makes her both Mary's niece and her half-sister.

And as if all that weren't enough, Nathaniel kept the severed heads of Mary's grandmother, mother, and sister as trophies.

By now, you don't just want Mary to get out of that house. You want her to set it ablaze.

And she gets her chance. With the truth finally out, Mary's got every reason to want revenge, and let's just say Stappard doesn't deny her the opportunity. The final stretch is a blood-soaked reckoning as Mary turns the tables on the men who've terrorized her family for generations. I won't give away exactly how she does it, but after everything we've learned, I was firmly on her side.

Who do you think you are?

A moody ghost story unfolding in an opulent Victorian estate, Mārama is a rage-fueled blend of Indigenous horror and Gothic aesthetics. Every respectable English mansion needs its secrets, but Hawsker Manor is practically a crime scene masquerading as a country estate. If Stappard's aim is to make us feel like we just woke up inside a Mary Shelley novel, mission accomplished.

But unlike Shelley, Mārama has a bone to pick with the British Empire, and with a character like Sir Nathaniel Cole, it's easy to see why. Nathaniel genuinely believes he's a cultured gentleman. He's somehow mistaken possession for appreciation and his own entitlement for generosity. He can't even offer hospitality without reminding Mary how much of her world he believes belongs to him. You almost have to admire the audacity. Almost.

Even the ghosts refuse to behave the way Gothic ghosts are supposed to. Usually, a mysterious woman appearing in a hallway is your cue to run. In Mārama, you'd be better off listening to her. The living are infinitely more terrifying than anything lurking in the shadows.

Like Get Out before it, Mārama mines some of its most unsettling scares from the socially accepted fetishization of another culture. The ghosts and gore are plenty frightening, but Stappard finds just as much dread in a polite conversation littered with microaggressions. At first, Cole speaking Māori almost passes for a welcoming gesture. Soon, every syllable he utters in Mary's language sounds more and more menacing.

Horror has always been fertile ground for exploring what it means to be treated as the Other, but the genre still has some glaring blind spots about whose stories get told. Which is why Mārama feels so thrillingly overdue. Stappard takes the familiar ingredients of Gothic horror—ancestral ghosts, twisted family histories, a manor full of nightmares—and uses them to confront atrocities that needed no supernatural help to happen.

“To move into our future we must understand our past,” reads a title card at the start of Mārama. And for Mary, that's a particularly brutal assignment. She's spent her life looking for a family, only to discover a history almost too terrible to bear. Yet the women she's been taught to fear are the very ones guiding her toward a future they were denied. That's a beautiful bit of tenderness in a film that's otherwise very comfortable making you squirm.

It also gives us one of the most satisfying endings in a while. Because this isn't simply a "white man bad" film. Mary can't undo what Nathaniel did, and no amount of punishment will bring the women in her family back. But she can stop letting his version of their history be the one that survives. She can decide what happens next. And yes, she can get revenge, which I love.

By the end, Mary has fully embraced her true self and reclaimed her name, Mārama. She surrenders to brutality in pursuit of justice. It's shockingly gory and horrifyingly bloody, but damn, is it cathartic.