[usr 4.5]
After a man is seemingly strangled in his bed, criminal psychologist Kate Fuller (Olga Kurylenko) interviews the sole witness, the victim’s eight-year-old daughter, Sophie. When asked to identify the killer, Sophie says, “Mara.” As Kate digs into the case, she unearths a community of people who claim to be tormented by a shadowy menace — a centuries-old demon who kills her victims as they sleep.
Like Freddy Krueger, the producers of “Mara” utilize a horror villain that attacks its victims while sleeping. What sets the two characters apart though, is that Mara is quiet and does not spout one-liners when she is about to off one of her victims, she quietly, and very deliberately, does what she set out to do and moves on. Freddy, while genuinely dark and terrifying in the first three Elm Street movies, gradually became a caricature of his former scary self, hogging the spotlight with his imaginative and creative kills, becoming less and less frightening with every new entry in the series. Instead of “Freddy vs. Jason,” I think “Freddy vs. Mara” would make for a far more interesting film.
Olga Kurylenko plays Kate Fuller, a criminal psychologist who is called in to a seemingly straightforward homicide to ascertain the mental state of the person suspected of the crime. She tries talking with Helena (Rosie Fellner), the prime suspect in the death of her husband the previous night but she is unresponsive so Kate tries talking to Helena’s young daughter, Sophie (Mackenzie Imsand). Sophie claims to not having seen the actual crime but before discovering the dead body of her father, she states that she heard creepy voices coming from a demon named Mara. With her husband having recently admitted to an affair, the cops lock Helena away, citing his admission of guilt as her motive.
The case seems pretty clear-cut for Kate but when she is called in to another homicide, and the victim appears to have been killed much the same way that Helena’s husband was, with his head turned almost backward with a look of sheer terror on his face, Kate begins to investigate. She discovers that Helena’s husband had been going to a support group for people who suffer from sleep paralysis and decides to pay them a visit. Within this group, she is drawn to Dougie (Craig Conway), a man who insists that the sleep paralysis is how Mara comes after her victims. He later explains to her that Mara predates Jesus, going back thousands of years and according to Germanic and Scandinavian folklore, she instills nightmares into her victims over time, and then gradually scares them into sleep paralysis, where they are wide awake but unable to move, and then proceeds to sit on their chest where she strangles them to death.
Initially, Kate shrugs this off, putting it down to a very unstable mind but when she starts seeing strange figures in her bedroom at night and begins experiencing sleep paralysis, with the sensation of someone, or some thing, putting pressure on her chest, she quickly realizes that Dougie might just be telling the truth. When she visits Helena at the sanitarium to talk to her about Mara but instead discovers her dead body, with terror etched in her face and her head turned almost backward, she goes to Dougie who is now convinced that Mara will come for him soon and resorts to cutting off his eyelids. She takes him to a friend of hers, Dr. Ellis (Mitch Eakins), the man in charge of the support group for sleep paralysis and when she tries to explain what’s going on, he does his best to believe her outrageous claims, stating that they will watch over Dougie until he recuperates. As the night progresses, and everything becomes deathly quiet, Kate realizes it’s only a matter of time before Mara appears to take Dougie and desperate to save him, and herself, she races to Dougie’s place looking for clues, and there, she finally comprehends Mara’s motives. But is she too late to save Dougie, and more importantly, herself?
“Mara” could have very easily become another generic horror film that starts out promising and by its final act, proceeds to fall apart but thanks to director Clive Tonge, in his feature film directorial debut, he knows what scares people and utilizes it to its fullest effect. We have all seen shadows in the dark and the fear of lying in bed wide awake but not being able to move while something is approaching you, that is one hell of a scary scenario. Just like the shark in “Jaws,” and the shower scene in “Psycho,” Tonge relies heavily on real and substantiated fears and it is this reason that “Mara” is so creepy and effective. The producers stated that they’d like to do a series of movies featuring Mara, sort of like “The Conjuring” universe and I really hope they do as Mara is genuinely scary. Her contorted and malformed movements are distressingly sinister and with no speech attached to her character, she remains even more of an enigma, as just the mere sight of her is enough to warrant nightmares. Olga Kurylenko shines as the movie’s protagonist and delivers a worthwhile performance and as one of the lesser-known Bond girls, she proves herself more than capable of tackling any role.
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