HIFF Review: Mārama (2025)

President Rhea Chalak reviews Kiwi gothic horror film Mārama (2025), which takes us on the journey of a young Māori woman fighting to reclaim her identity in 19th-century England.

The idea of the Gothic in media and literature emerged in the late 18th and 19th centuries as a cultural response to profound sociopolitical changes, namely, the Enlightenment, industrialisation, and colonialism. At its core, the genre spoke solemnly of terror and the inexplicable. Labyrinthine estates; oppressive patriarchal households; cryptic and unsettling occurrences: these motifs became an avenue through which fears of social collapse—power, class, morality—could then hide within. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), for instance, the terrifying titular figure creeps quietly from the outskirts of Europe into civilised London, to feed off the life of people. 

The tangible fear within the Victorian world was that somehow, these wicked, violent villains that they’d forcefully expelled to the periphery, indicted or not–and not forgetting the physiognomic pseudoscience that pervaded most of Victorian culture–would taint their people, contaminate their blood. And it tracks that much of the Gothic is rooted in presenting the Other as one to be feared, whether the transgressive, independent woman or the foreigner from lands away. Toa Stappard’s Mārama (2025), conversely, rips the Gothic genre apart and reassembles it from the perspective of this Other, which reveals one of the most violent and inexplicable horrors of all: colonialism.

The film follows Mary (Ariāna Osborne), a young Māori woman who has travelled to England to retrace her ancestry. She is Māori, but dresses Victorian. She dons innumerable layers of elaborate, restrictive clothing: tight corsets, a petticoat, full skirts, and finally, a bonnet; the perfect subject of the British Empire, one forcibly bound and constricted. We learn that Mary—renamed “Mary” from the original “Mārama”—was adopted into a white family.  After having received a letter that offered information about her birth family, she makes her voyage across the oceans to its origin, to England. Upon disembarking, however, Mary learns that the sender, inexplicably, is dead. Instead, his employer Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens) kindly offers to take her into his home—a sprawling family estate, where within his massive gardens is (rather on-the-nose) a maze—so she can be governess to his young granddaughter, who also happens to have Māori blood. Mary is understandably reluctant, insistent on continuing her search. In response, as if to assure her, Cole says to her in Māori: “Stay here with us.” As she questions him, shocked that he knows her language, he replies: “I know your people. I feel as if I know you too.”

What follows is a strange culmination of hauntings. Mary is haunted by what seem to be recurring nightmares, but they reveal themselves to be more like visions, or messages from her ancestors. As she navigates her reality, she begins to realise that there are terrors far worse than her mind can conjure, and it is within Nathaniel’s sprawling mansion where the real horror reveals its bloodied and gaping maw. On the surface, Nathaniel is deeply interested in Māori culture: his house ornamented with Māori artefacts. But now, Mary herself, holed up in his residence, seems to add to his eclectic collection. It is not unlike a hostage situation: she is reduced to but another artefact for exhibition, as a living metonym for her culture. “Your people,” Nathaniel says to her, cloyingly, “are magnificent specimens”. He doesn’t see Mary for her personhood, but for her signification: for Nathaniel, these Maori objects symbolise his power—the coloniser’s power—his subjugation of a total culture, being able to immobilise and dehumanise them en masse. The Māori that line his halls also hold up the foundation of this vast home: their exploitation is the foundation upon which the coloniser’s wealth is built upon. The luxurious halls and grounds, then, are not as innocuous as they used to seem. Grandiose and magnificent at first, the endless walls of Māori artefacts then begin to look less like a sanctum of appreciation, but rather, morbid graveyards and effigies of Mary’s people, paraded simply as exotic decor.

A still from recurring dreams that Mary/Mārama has, being visited by her ancestors.

For a directorial feature debut, New Zealander writer-director Taratoa Stappard delivers a narrative that nauseates, amongst a brilliant cast. Osborne’s rigid facial expressions and the intensity of her eyes construct a character to resist the trope of the young, naïve woman who needs an older male saviour; whilst Stephens plays, unnervingly, the genteel, overly nice man whose mask begins to expose its cracks. We are presented with the obvious tropes of the Gothic—at a certain point, it can feel a little too glaring and overt when these tropes are thrust upon the audience to make its subversive nature evident. It also recalls, unfortunately, Robert Egger’s 2024 Nosferatu, one of the other Gothics released this past year, and much more widely than Mārama–as a more independent work–will be able to at all. Yet, Mārama manages to evade mediocrity, for its colonial spin profoundly subverts the Gothic medium: period-piece as it is, it stubbornly (and soberingly) remains relevant in the present, post-colonial contemporary world. To me, it chews up and spits out the condescending character tropes constructed by the original Gothic writers. Instead, it states assertively, and holds up to the light the true cannibals, the true villains and barbarians hiding in the shadowy corridors of fancy estates within Victorian England and the British Empire—the colonisers themselves. Where within the original Gothic medium the main characters cower from the past coming back to haunt and terrorise the present, here it is the past that Mārama clings to, holding on to her Indigenous wisdom to reveal buried truths and reconnect with her own heritage reconstructing what can never be destroyed. All that aside, the film’s duration was wanting—a little bit more length would have allowed it to more subtly figure these coloniser-colonised dynamics, instead of its ‘show not tell’ approach it seems to take on, such that the vindicating ending would feel all the more satisfying. 

As a self-professed horror-avoider, the film left me reeling from shock and dread, and yet, I found it left a tangible imprint on me. Being the first Kiwi film, and perhaps more extensively the first Māori film that I have had the opportunity to watch, it only made me all the more curious of Indigenous films and communities from around the world; to place a spotlight on these overlooked international stories, but likewise, on those within our region as well. 

As the closing credits rolled, I thought: nothing a film could portray through metaphor—or even truthfully, through documentary—could ever truly match up to the terrifying brutality and bloodshed of the wicked barbarism that is colonialism.

This film was programmed at the Hawai’i International Film Festival, 2025.