I’ll start by stating that Mārama has an excellent premise. A young Māori woman enters a Victorian manor looking for her family history. She discovers that the Englishman welcoming her inside has turned her culture into part of his private collection. The house is handsome, cold, and crowded with stolen meaning. It should be the perfect setting for a Gothic story about colonialism.
And it is, for a while. Writer-director Taratoa Stappard has made a visually confident debut, and I enjoyed the way the film relocates colonial horror to England. Instead of watching British characters travel abroad, invade another country, and encounter the consequences of their own violence, we remain in Yorkshire. The empire has already brought its trophies home. They sit in cabinets, hang from walls, and decorate a wealthy man’s estate.
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The problem is that Mārama rarely trusts these images to speak for themselves. Its ideas are compelling but obvious. To make things worse, the film’s pace is slow without becoming hypnotic, and its long-awaited catharsis is carefully staged for an audience reaction. I admire what the film is attempting. I just don’t think it gets there often enough.
Ariāna Osborne plays Mary Stevens, an orphan raised far from the Māori ancestry she barely understands. A mysterious letter draws her to Hawkser Manor, where Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens) claims to possess information about her parents. Nathaniel offers her work as governess to his granddaughter, Anne, while displaying an unsettling familiarity with Māori language and culture.
His interest initially presents itself as respect. Nathaniel knows words Mary doesn’t. He possesses objects that might help reconnect her with the life taken from her. He appears eager to explain what she’s lost. That generosity never feels innocent, though.
Nathaniel’s fascination is really another form of possession. He appreciates Māori culture in the same way he appreciates the objects arranged throughout his home: as something beautiful, exotic, and available for him to possess in one form or another. He can recognize its value without recognizing the autonomy of the people who created it. Even his apparent preservation of the past requires that the past belong to him.
This is the film’s best idea. Cultural fascination can look like admiration while really transforming a living culture into an aesthetic object. Nathaniel doesn’t think of himself as a destroyer, but rather a curator. That self-image allows him to interpret ownership as protection and theft as an act of appreciation.
The manor gives this contradiction a physical form. It’s less a home than a museum whose exhibits have begun pushing back against the man who catalogued them. Mirrors, dim rooms, ceremonial objects, and glimpses of another identity gradually connect Mary to the name Mārama and to a history Nathaniel can describe but never truly understand.
The production design does a great deal of the work. Hawkser Manor is sufficiently oppressive, while the costumes are easily among the film’s strongest elements. Mārama’s red gown is especially memorable. It makes her the visual center of the room while also revealing the violence hidden inside Nathaniel’s admiration. He wants her displayed beautifully and he wants everyone to look.
The film was pitched as a meeting between Get Out and Lady Macbeth, and the comparison makes sense. Like William Oldroyd’s film, Mārama traps a woman inside an elegant house governed by male authority. The stillness, interiors, and period clothing become part of that confinement. Yet Lady Macbeth allows its protagonist’s liberation to become morally unstable. Mārama is far more certain about how we should interpret nearly everyone and everything.
That certainty flattens the characters. Osborne, Stephens, and the supporting cast are all fine, but none of the performances struck me as exceptional. The actors often seem to be carrying out positions already settled by the screenplay. Mārama represents cultural recovery. Nathaniel represents colonial ownership. Peggy represents another person living within the hierarchy of the manor. Once those positions become clear, there isn’t much room left for contradiction or surprise.
Stephens has the necessary confidence and menace, but Nathaniel is so transparently wrong that the film never lets his paternalism become genuinely insidious. I understood him almost immediately. Every new disclosure confirmed the same judgment.
This connects to the film’s pacing problem. A slow burn works when waiting changes our understanding of what we’ve seen. Here, the first half withholds information, but it doesn’t generate much uncertainty. Nathaniel’s obsession, the house’s secrets, and Mārama’s connection to them are all signaled early. The film then spends a considerable amount of time moving toward revelations that feel less like discoveries than formal confirmations.
I had a similar reservation about the conclusion of Hysteria. Both films begin with provocative questions about who controls cultural meaning, then gradually replace tension with explanation. Mārama is even more direct. It doesn’t simply expose colonial violence. It underlines the symbolism until very little interpretive space remains.
The haka sequence should be the emotional release. Mārama, dressed in red and surrounded by people who have reduced her identity to spectacle, asserts a cultural power they cannot comfortably absorb. On paper, the reversal is excellent. She refuses to remain the beautiful object Nathaniel has arranged for their consumption. On screen, it just didn’t work for me.
The scene feels built for applause. Its rhythm, reaction shots, and symbolism announce its importance so emphatically that I was aware of the filmmakers preparing the audience to cheer. The subsequent turn is intended to complicate that response, but the machinery is already visible. Instead of experiencing the moment with Mārama, I felt instructed to recognize it as cathartic.
Stappard has discussed festival audiences cheering during the haka before the film confronted them with the colonial gaze inside the room. In an interview about the film’s Māori Gothic approach, he explains how that reversal altered the audience’s reaction. I understand the intention. Intellectually, the scene is doing something more complicated than offering a simple victory. Emotionally, it still feels too engineered.
The revenge that follows is satisfying in principle, and I won’t reveal its final mechanics. Colonial violence returns to the country and household that have attempted to convert it into history and decoration. Mārama is no longer an artifact in someone else’s story, but the person deciding what the story means.
Still, the revenge is more inevitable than surprising. By the time the film gets there, Nathaniel has become a straightforward embodiment of colonial evil, and the distinctions between reclaiming, punishing, and destroying have mostly disappeared. A stronger film might have left me uneasy about the cost of reclamation. This one mainly asks me to wait for the correct people to receive what’s coming.
There’s certainly room for politically direct horror. I’ve written before about how politics in horror films can shape both what audiences fear and how critics respond. Subtlety isn’t an automatic virtue, especially when the history being represented has so often been softened, hidden, or narrated by the people responsible for it. My problem isn’t that Mārama condemns colonialism too forcefully. It’s that the condemnation too often replaces dramatic complexity.
I wanted more friction between its ideas. Can a stolen object ever be cared for by the person who refuses to return it? Does recovering an ancestry restore the self, or reveal how much can never be recovered? When does fascination become appropriation? The film raises all of these questions, but it answers most of them with zero room for doubt or interpretation.
Even so, I wouldn’t call Mārama a failure. Its Māori perspective gives the familiar Victorian Gothic manor a different historical angle, and its best images understand that collecting can be a form of violence. The costumes, interiors, and use of cultural objects often communicate that more powerfully than the dialogue. I just wish the film had trusted them.
Mārama looks like a Gothic reckoning, and occasionally it feels like one. More often, it is an attractive, slow-moving statement whose conclusions arrive long before its revenge. The house is full of ghosts, stolen histories, and terrible objects. Unfortunately, there aren’t many mysteries.
Mārama (2025) Film Rating: ★★½ out of 5
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