A Possessão de Mary

Gary Oldman what ya doing? I watched this because of you.

Mary is one of those films that sets sail but has no real sense of direction. Its biggest short coming in my opinion is the premise is sound but the setting is wrong.

A modestly sized family yacht, simply doesn't provide enough physical space and as a consequence scope, to meet the expectations, this horror aspires to. Its as if, for example, Friday the 13th, was set in a phone booth. its far too constrained and has to fall back on drawn out physiological tension, in a vain attempt, to compensate.

The result is a slow, predictable and ultimately, rather anti climatic film, that takes the viewer nowhere interesting. That's in spite of a strong cast, quality acting and decent cinematography.

Marginally watchable but that said, there are far better horror films with a nautical bent on offer, like 80's classic, The Fog. 5/10 from me.

It's actually not so much the ability of the actors to act (I don't think anybody will see Gary Oldman and doubt he can act), but it is the script and the horror movie cliches/tropes that will likely get you quite upset. To say the least. And you also have other people in here (Emily Mortimer), who are way above anything in depth, that the movie can offer them.

Having said all that and all the things that are predictable, the movie can still be enjoyable to a certain degree/level. You have to be a fan and not mind the flaws that are littered throughout the running time.

Okay, so there's nothing new here, or particularly original, but from the get go at least there are characters on display and they are behaving believably. Makes you a little more vested in the situation as it unfolds. I don't know that the flashback structure of it helped any, but what most folks want to know is "was it scary?" or "was it stupid?" For my tastes it was involving enough, with a few creepy vibes but nothing really exceptional. I could have done without the lazy go to of repeated nightmares in order to have something unnerving happen. Make the shocks part of the story! Make them part of the situation! We lose investment if we expect every unusual occurrence to just be a harmless dream. But that being said, at least it wasn't stupid the rest of the time and I never had the urge to fast forward thru it. Entirely acceptable. But I doubt I'll ever watch it again. There needs to be an option with the streaming services between "liked" and "disliked".

Trapped on the open sea in a haunted boat is an oft-seen horror movie scenario, but rarely has it been used with as little imagination as in Mary. In telling his nautical tale of terror, director Michael Goi employs so many hackneyed techniques that even the talents of Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer cannot prevent the film from being a colossal waste of time.

Introducing his film at Frightfest, Goi claimed to have over 18,000 films in his collection, so one wonders why he directs like he's only ever seen a handful, and bad ones at that. One might think that with such a wealth of inspiration, he could have come up with something a little more creative... something that didn't rely so heavily on obvious supernatural jump scares accompanied by obligatory loud noises. The scenes intended to have me throwing my popcorn in the air in fright actually had me holding my head in dismay: this is about as basic as horror movies get.

3/10. I imagine that It'll be a case of abandon ship for many who dare to sail these treacherous waters.