Geek Review: Mara

For a film that’s essentially about trying to stay awake, Mara does a very good job nearly putting audiences to sleep. Infusing the horrors of sleep paralysis with demonic mysticisms, the movie attempts to sell us the legend of a malevolent entity that goes about choking people in their sleep.

And despite the cheap wire-fu acrobatics our titular demon performs for us on screen, its half-baked mythology doesn’t really fly.

Our willingness to buy into the film’s antics and suspend our disbelief is first hampered by its lazily single-faceted cast of characters. Olga Kurylenko’s (Quantum of Solace, Johnny English Strikes Again) over-the-top delivery of protagonist, Kate Fuller, fails to connect with her audience, as her cued screaming and wailing come off as insincere and distracting, prompting little empathy from audiences. But considering the script she’s been handed, which features a dreadful amount of expository dialogue all designed to hammer in her entire sob story within the first act, we realise Kurylenko didn’t exactly have much to work with.

Accompanying her lacklustre performance, Craig Conway (How to Stop Being A Loser) plays the loud, brash and physically violent Dougie, who’s introduced solely to provide Fuller some historical context on the demon’s hauntings via — you guessed it — an awfully expository monologue, and subsequently, the means to avoid her own gruesome end via the vast extensive research he leaves her with, and pretty much fails to make proper use of himself.

Conway’s character is, of course, predictably murdered after having outlived his narrative significance during the lead-up to the climax. And while we like that our protagonist deals with her demonic problem all on her own (no priest, no shaman, or ghost-expert to call), we also find ourselves mildly bothered by her glaring lack of existing relationships. Humans are social. It bugs us to no end that throughout this entire film, Fuller seems to be utterly devoid of friends or family. A character in unexplained social isolation, but seems for all intents and purposes perfectly functional, does not a believable human make.

And as if it isn’t insulting enough that our protagonist is a hollow farce, we were forced to suffer through what has to be one of the most unimpressive demons we’ve ever laid our eyes upon. For the most part, Mara looks to be no more than a pale, slightly underfed girl, sporting double-jointed limbs and an awkward limp (we’re not going into ableist discourse). And no amount of odd creaking foley is going to convince us she’s a demon capable of choking anyone to death, asleep or not.

It certainly doesn’t help that Kurylenko’s portrayal of sleep paralysis is blatantly sensationalised. Her eyelids fly open as she wakes. She’s fully conscious, her body’s tensed, and she jerks like she’s having a fit — or, well, sex. Lounging on her bed, she whimpers and groans as Mara ambles towards her, leans over her slowly as one would an old lover, at which point, we were wondering if we’d inadvertently signed ourselves up for lesbian porn.

When we’re finally treated to a full frontal of our titular demon, in what’s possibly the last three minutes of the film, she’s swaying like a drunkard as she stumbles towards our spellbound protagonist in excruciating slowness, her arms waving wildly in a laughable parody of Michael Jackson’s iconic performance, Thriller.

She rises into the air, gown trailing and losing all semblance of ghostliness because the CGI team’s apparently gave up on those double-jointed limbs. We wait with bated breath, as she hovers. And at long last, Mara surges forward to grasp our protagonist in what is we’re sure to be a loving embrace, just as the camera cuts to black.

Wait, so they live happily ever after in ghostly matrimony?

No? You don’t think that’s how it ended?

Well, dang, you’re probably right. Man, if that had been how it ended, we might have given the film extra points for subverting our expectations. But Mara’s failed to surprise us at every turn, so our protagonist is probably pushing daisies sans demon wife. And we don’t even care, because there’s nothing about her that inspired empathy.

Given how regrettably lacking this movie is, we can’t really think of any reason for you to catch it… unless you’re having a persistent bout of insomnia, in which case, we might actually recommend the film, because it could successfully put you to sleep.