A group of friends and family test run a boat called Mary in the Bermuda Triangle. Will it bring them a second chance at getting closer together or tear them apart? Hmmmmmm. I love horror movies and grade on a curve, but this one is not worth your time.
Initially I applauded Mary for referencing Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the book, not the movie) imagery and starting in the day. I am rarely wrong when it comes to detesting and being alarmed about the quality of films that sport certain narrative tropes. This film begins with the How We Got Here trope by beginning at the end thus leaching any suspense and tension from the story so before the movie has had time to really cook, one can retroactively surmise what happened and who will survive. I wish that more time was spent getting to know each character before supernatural shenanigans began to affect them. It feels as if a lot of character development was left on the cutting room floor, and I would have enjoyed seeing the true starting point of this problem, a character constantly referenced, but never shown.
Spooky shenanigans start because a boat, which always has women names, seduces those within its reach and influence their actions. How? Who cares about the details? Not this movie. Mary is like a floating Overlook hotel with more reason for being aggrieved, but with only one angry ghost and plenty more eligible victims though it is unclear how she gets each individual under her sway since each has specific unique vulnerabilities though some are never revealed if the character is considered too minor and exists only to be easily eliminated without bringing the story to a screeching halt. Also why can she not control all of them at once? It appears that she has had enough time to practice.
The best horror movies utilize real life psychological fears to underpin the fictional terror. Mary had no central focus. What should scare us? There is plenty to choose from, but the plethora of options, which dilutes the impact and leaves us with half-baked, cheap jump scares and visual supernatural tropes, some lifted from my favorite genre of found footage, that fail to effectively sustain the atmosphere of dread and leaves its audience feeling cheated.
I love a woman protagonist, but Mary elects to make the wife, Sarah, a narrator in the vein of The Usual Suspects when the real beginning of the story suggests that one of the men may make a better focus, specifically the husband, David. I love the eternally affable Emily Mortimer, who plays Sarah, and looks great in her casual wear, but Gary Oldman, who plays David and is really slumming it here, won a freaking Oscar for literally becoming Winston Churchill and successfully burying any negative press on Google with his talent. No brainer and no offense intended to Mortimer!
David makes a better protagonist because he is having a mild midlife crisis and putting everything on the line: his family, his friends, his job, his finances and his time. He has lost the hope, autonomy and joy of work that he knew as a child. He has a subconscious need to even the score with his wife without any conscious animus. He removes his family from certain threats to insure that they are more dependent on him, and as the captain, is imbued with an unilateral authority that is absent on land. David is an interesting man. On the surface, he is a nice guy: forgiving, refreshingly open-minded when it comes to helping others, unjudgmental, encouraging his daughter’s love life, but he has genuinely disassociated himself from his human, darker feelings that should have fueled the drama , and he seems taken aback when he or another character verbalizes it. We also learn a lot of these details from massive prose dumps. Midway through the movie, we stop relating to his unspoken, but properly conveyed concerns.
Instead Mary steers towards Sarah, the typical average woman character whose concerns are dismissed, allows guilt to cloud her judgment and make her agree to endangering her family’s financial and physical well-being. I love a mama bear and seeing women get down, but the theme is introduced a little too late in the proceedings to grip me. I understand that the writer was creating a link between the ship’s history, the supernatural force and the wife, but even M. Night Shyamalan does not always stick the landing. Going the primal way does not work because that theme does not exist throughout the entire story, but kudos to Mortimer for displaying some unexpected action chops. She should gain some casting director’s interest and get cast in some against type roles.
I did my best to ignore all the signs that Mary was a stinker because Jennifer Esposito’s exchanges with Mortimer created a pleasant tension that in spite of the narrative flaws, made me intrigued with their interaction. Movies do not ususally have two women go toe to toe like that, especially such different types of actors.
When Mary gets terrifying, it is when there are unexpected flashes of violence from unlikely characters, but there are too many characters to sustain it. Even though it is cliché, I would have preferred that route then all the others, which may pose a greater physical threat, but lack narrative cohesion. I prefer the one that poses the least physical threat because the characters have fewer acceptable reactions to that threat. There needs to be some logic behind the spiritual subjugation other than availability and the ability to inflict more damage. Kudos to Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, a family friend and crewmember, for making a meal out of a snack, but his character was expected to do the most while being given nothing to hang his actions on. The oneiric elements did not work for me.
Mary’s underlying legend also felt slight. It relied on a lot of well-trod cliches, but if I had to choose my favorite one, it is the research sequence, which the father should have done earlier in the film, but the research suggests that this family does not meet the supernatural force’s usual requirements. I do not mind inexplicable evil, but it felt like a rip off of another movie, Pay the Ghost. Fun fact: Nicholas Cage was supposed to play the father, not Oldman, which makes sense considering the quality of the film.
Mary is Michael Goi’s debut feature film. Goi usually directs for television series. When a movie takes place on the ocean, viewers expect a certain amount of grandeur. Maybe it does not translate to the small screen, but I never gasped over the beauty and infiniteness of life on the water, which is painstakingly discussed. Show, do not tell, is a reoccurring problem for this film.
Mary is available for streaming on Hulu if you do not want to take my word for it and decide to watch this anti-climactic movie. It is not the worst movie in the world, but it is so lacking in follow through that disappointment is inevitable in spite of having a great cast.
