Mary

Mary_360P

source: Mary

This movie was utterly pointless. But I will still give it 2....the end.

Today's horror fans don't seem to understand that you don't need a group of nubile teens that look like they walked off the pages of a fashion magazine and you don't need gore laden effects to make an effective ghost story. The two greatest ghost films ever made, THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and THE UNINVITED, had none of these things and yet to this day provide solid scares. So when MARY came to me I wondered if it would be up to the challenge. The story opens with a ship in distress and few survivors being picked up. The setting moves to an interrogation room where Sarah (Emily Mortimer) is being questioned by Detective Clarkson (Jennifer Esposito). Before she will allow her to see her two daughters, Clarkson wants to know what took place on the boat and to find out if Sarah is a murderer or just plain crazy. And so Sarah begins her story. Sarah's husband Dave (Gary Oldman) is a ship's captain working for a tourist company in Florida who has dreamed of owning his own ship to take people out to sea. When he and his partner Mike (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) go to look at a potential ship, David is drawn to a battered old ship that was abandoned at sea and towed in by the Coast Guard. A ships masthead of a woman leads the ship and intrigues him. He buys the ship and insists with a little work it will be the perfect boat for the family. They clean the ship up and prepare for a test run sailing across the Atlantic. With their youngest daughter Mary (Chloe Perrin) who thinks the boat is named after her, teenage daughter Lindsey (Stephanie Scott), her boyfriend to be Tommy (Owen Teague) and Mike, they prepare to set sail. Strange things happen before leaving as Tommy takes a picture of the group in front of the boat only to see an eerie image in the flash as he takes it. Once at sea stranger things happen. Mary begins talking about a new friend she's met on the boat. Then the first night out, Tommy attacks Mike with a knife. They subdue Tommy and at their first port leave him to calm down before heading home. They later learn that he hanged himself in his cell. As they travel forward we learn more about the family on board the ship. When Sarah tells David she wants to return he tells her they can't, that everything they have is tied into the boat and they must move forward. But those strange things continue to build. Sarah finds the logs of the ship and learns that three families have gone completely missing from the boat in the past. Then Mike goes mad. The question of what is behind this and if the family will survive is yet to be seen. The film works on many levels because what is terrifying is rarely if ever seen. A situation where you have to wonder is it something toxic on the ship that's causing this? Is it past relationships? Or is there really something that haunts those on board? That is what makes the film all the more mysterious. Add to that the sense of isolation when you have a boat in the middle of the ocean and the scares generate themselves. That feeling that it's too far to go back and so far from your destination. With nowhere to run from whatever you are confronting, how do you deal with it? While Oldman is the selling point of the film and turns in his usual great performance it is up to Mortimer to carry off this story and make it work. She does so in spades, having us wonder if this isn't some story she dreamed up to explain her actions or if she truly did see something out there. If she didn't play the part with conviction it would fall apart. Fortunately she does an amazing job. MARY won't be for all audiences. As I said today's young people have a tendency to ignore films that feature adults or that don't rely on gore to move the story forward. But horror fans that have been around a while will find this film a treat. With that in mind I can recommend this one with ease and hope that others will find it just as satisfying.

What on earth is Gary Oldman doing in this very low budget and formulaic ghost story? Apart from a few cheap jump scares this is very slow and boring. It has been done better loads of times before and has very little originality.

I am a horror movie fanatic. I have seen every worth while horror film and then some not so worth while & this was definitely worth watching. Acting is good ,believable , story was horrific & this was something different that we really enjoyed. If you enjoy ghost stories & well produced horror films this is a must watch! I can't understand how it only has a 4 star rating I almost gave it a 10 !

This is a real movie production with great acting and a budget...rarer and rarer these days...I would encourage more like this to be made...I guess the other reviewers are happier with what teenagers can make with 10 bucks and an iphone.

This movie has an excellent story and setting. It manages to create a claustrophobic environment in a ocean environment. The acting is solid and the direction/cinematography are wonderful! There are several beautiful shots of coastlines and wide open water. The only thing that took me out of the movie a bit was the framing device that was used. It's not that it was badly done. It's just that by cutting back and forth between the story and the framing it made the movie feel like a TV show at times. Overall it's a good movie that is worth checking out. Especially if you are looking for a horror movie that has a different setting than your typical haunted house.

Anyone who's read a few of my previous reviews will undoubtedly be sick of hearing it again, but it's a matter of granite truth: story is everything, even for a movie. If you have a great story, many of the other elements of a movie can be rubbish, and as long as they aren't completely unforgivable, the movie will still be okay. But if you have a crap story, then it's going to be a crap movie and that's the inevitable outcome. MARY, since it has a crap story (or NO story depending on your perspective), is a crap movie. And that as nice a spin as you can give it. Almost all of the other elements of MARY are good or excellent. Good production values, some "namebrand" actors, story concept that springs from the incredibly rich tradition of the supernatural so associated with the sea and ships, and so on. It even has a somewhat original/inventive script idea as its basis: a group of people having to deal with a hostile ghost in the isolated and claustrophobic conditions on a small boat. LOTS of sea-based and boat-based ghost stories abound in horror literature. The Flying Dutchman, an endless stream of ghost and horror stories birthed by the true story of the Mary Celeste (of which I've always been convinced that "Fire in the Galley Stove" by William Outerson was such an example), "The Derelict" by Hodgson, and so on. You might be tempted to think that there just isn't enough context to write a great story around the sea, a small boat and a handful of people. But we know that's not true; Hemingway did it in "The Old Man and the Sea" and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it. So we know that it CAN be done. While there are exceptions, I usually include a little preview of the story as part of my reviews, but MARY is one of those exceptions. The story is so shabby and its elements so overused you can summarize the entire thing in two sentences: There's this female ghost of sketchy origins that haunts a boat christened "Mary". A family buys the boat, refits it, and on its freshly renovated maiden voyage, the family and a couple of friends start trying to kill each other by virtue of the ghost's evil influence and, as you might expect, things end badly. The end. When you think about it, this really isn't an actual story as such. At best it's THE SHINING with saltwater and with everybody taking turns playing Jack Nicholson. And everybody acting crazy and trying to kill each other for no reason other than ghostly "influence" doesn't really constitute a story in any legitimate sense. It's just people behaving badly at random. With jazz hands. Personally, I am so thoroughly SICK of the "the devil made me do it" concept I could just throw up when a movie drifts in that direction. The everybody-woke-up-and-it-was-all-a-dream writer's ultimate childish copout would be Pulitzer material in comparison at this point. It really is a shame. MARY had great bones, as it were, for what could have been an excellent movie. I don't know how, but somebody just forgot to add a story to it.

Even Nicolas "I will take any acting job for money" Cage passed this one. That should say enough. The movie is boring and takes too long building up the characters and story. And when it finally should take off, it never really does. It's not scary, not exciting and no fun. Calling this "horror" is a complete joke.