|
|
MARY (2019)
Director: Michael Goi Cast: Gary Oldman, Emily Mortimer, Stefanie Scott, Chloe Perrin, Jennifer Esposito, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Owen Teague MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:24 Release Date: 10/11/19 (limited) |
|
Review by Mark Dujsik | October 10, 2019 The primary problem of Mary might be one of scale. This is a movie about a haunted boat—not a ship, like a cruise vessel or an ocean liner, but a sailing boat that can hold half a dozen people with relative comfort. At a certain point, a horror movie that's entirely about a ghost scaring characters in various places and possessing characters at assorted times is going to run out of spaces and people. Since Anthony Jaswinski's screenplay is pretty much out of ideas once the story is established, this movie only has spaces and people upon which to rely. Hence, Jaswinski and director Michael Goi basically do the same things over and over again—from the ghost's tactics in scaring or trying to kill people, to lines of expository dialogue, which are often repeated with minimal variation within a matter of a seconds. The feeling that the filmmakers are trying to spread their already-thin material even thinner is a constant. The plot has David (Gary Oldman), a tour boat captain in Florida, buying the eponymous sailing vessel, hoping to start his own company. His wife Sarah (Emily Mortimer) is skeptical but agrees pretty quickly anyway. That's perhaps because she had an affair with another man—a fact that David and the couple's older daughter Lindsey (Stefanie Scott) won't let Sarah forget. Also onboard are the couple's younger daughter Mary (Chloe Perrin) and two deckhands (played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Owen Teague), whose existences in the story are so trivial that their fates should be pretty obvious. The crew is heading to Bermuda on a trial run, and naturally, they begin to see and feel some weird things, like a shadowy figure and the discomfort when near the boat's masthead. There's a framing device, too, with Sarah, having survived whatever happened at sea, at a Coast Guard base, telling the story to a skeptical detective (played by Jennifer Esposito). That's a miscalculation, since the story of the haunting, which is already repetitive, only starts to seem pointless, since the scenes in the present establish the end result of what's to come on the boat. The thrust of Mary, then, is a story in which the same thing happens again and again to characters who say and do the same things again and again. It's bland and banal excuse for a horror movie. Copyright © 2019 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
Buy Related Products
|
(for
some terror, violence, and language)
