“Over 40% of the world’s population suffer from sleep paralysis,” the written preamble to Mara informs us, before going on with: “Two thirds of them describe being attacked by a demonic entity.” These fanciful statistics delivered, director Clive Tonge (who presumably wrote this nonsense with co-writer Jonathan Frank) gets his movie underway.
It is, you won’t be surprised to discover, a horror movie about demonic entities – just the one, in fact – who visit people in the night and pin them to the mattress while they lie in bed asleep, or are frozen in fear half awake while all this is going on.
The star is Olga Kurylenko, who plays a forensic psychologist working on the case of a woman who has killed her husband in the night. The “Mara” – a demon – did it, claims the terrified woman now in a police cell. The job Dr Kate Fuller (Kurylenko) has been tasked with is to decide whether the presumed perpetrator is mad or bad.
Instead, and I bet you couldn’t see this coming, she decides that the woman might be telling the truth. And, going entirely against the desires of her seen-it-all boss McCarthy (Lance E Nichols), sets off on a one-woman investigative journey to winkle out the truth.
Tonge and Frank give us some lore – Maras have been known by various names throughout history, it seems, and at one point there’s a cutaway to a famous picture of a demon sitting on someone’s chest. There is something to all this: Google “sleep paralysis demon” and there’s plenty out there, new to me though it is.
But for the most part this is a police procedural centred on shrink Dr Fuller’s investigation, with some icky demonic stuff thrown in now and again, meat for the horror hounds, particularly as things move towards their demonic climax.
It took five years to get this movie onto the screen, from the moment Kurylenko signed on to its eventual fairly lukewarm reviews. The apparent idea was to get something along the lines of Insidious going, a franchise centred on old-school scares and using a lot of physical effects, sound design and flickering lighting.
It also uses Javier Botet as the demon, the gangly Spaniard who turns up all over the place – from the creature in 2007’s [Rec] to Dracula in last year’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter – when spindly, loose-jointed ghouls are called for.
He’s effective, as are the special effects. Kurylenko is also convincing as a woman launching herself into something she doesn’t understand and being frightened half to death by what she discovers.
Whether you will like it more than its tepid rep depends largely on your attitude towards very familiar horror. Mara sets out to deliver genre comfort food and that’s what it does. Formal experiment, left-field plotting and technical innovation is not what this is about.
So you get to ask the usual questions, like “doesn’t this woman have an actual job to do, never mind the personal investigation taking up every minute of her day”. And you get to meet the usual types – like the character who explains it all, in this case played by UK actor Craig Conway with a mad stare that should really get him more work Stateside.
Is it a great movie? No, and it’s not trying to be. But it’s well made and has its moments, plus there are some good scares, particularly towards the end, and Tonge and co also keep their demon largely hidden, letting the audience do the imaginative work.
There are whodunits called “cozies” by the fans – amateur, often female, sleuths solving crime in the most soft-boiled of scenarios – and Mara is an example of what you might call “cozy horror”. If “cozy horror” isn’t an absolute contradiction in terms, this comes pretty close. No butcher’s apron required.
Mara – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
