Mārama screened at Panic Fest and the Overlook Film Festival, 10 April 2026; in US cinemas 17 April, and on US VOD 12 May 2026 via Dark Sky Films X Watermelon Pictures
Mārama opens with text, in both Māori and in English, as though translating between two coded, clashing outlooks. First there is a content warning concerning “disturbing scenes of the violation and desecration of Māori culture” which are “grounded in the colonised history of Aotearoa New Zealand”, and then there is this statement: “To move into our future we must understand our past…” Those last words are echoed within the film by a recurring expression used by more than one character: “Walking backwards into the future.”
That phrase certainly describes what 26-year-old Māori protagonist Mary Stevens (Ariāna Osborne) is doing. For she has travelled by sea, 73 days from Wellington to Whitby. Mary was summoned to England by a letter from one Thomas Boyd, who promised to reveal who her parents were, but was already dead by the time she arrived. Abandoned and adopted as a baby, Mary has voyaged to the land of her colonisers on a quest for her own severed bloodline and disrupted history, so that she can face her future armed with her past. In the meantime, she considers taking employment offered by Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens) as governess to his nine-year-old granddaughter Anne (Evelyn Towersey). In Hawkser Manor, Nathaniel’s isolated Yorkshire estate, Mary would be joining another Māori member of staff, the maid Peggy (Umi Myers), as well as Nathaniel’s alcoholic adult son Arthur (Jordan Mooney).
Ex-whaler Nathaniel, who once plied his trade in New Zealand and is fluent in Māori, is unusually invested in Mary and welcomes her with open arms – but Hawkser Manor is a classic gothic setting, with its walls covered in ancestral faces and paintings of colonial predation, its dimly lit passageways, its locked doors, its concealed rooms and its secrets hidden in plain sight. There are many other gothic touches. It is not just the film’s setting in the Victorian England of 1859, but also Mary’s landing on British shores expressly at Whitby, that key location from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897), and her new status, in shades of Henry James’ gothic novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), as a governess who alone can see the ghosts that haunt the place. Meanwhile, in her desperation to find her lost family and a sense of identity, Mary will discover her powers as a seer, inherited through the maternal line, that cast light on the dark perversions within this house and fill in the missing gaps of both her own traumatic family history and the film’s narrative.
At the centre of the property, kept out of sight within a garden enclosure, is a reconstructed wharenui that represents, in crude facsimile, the primal scene of this damaged dynasty. For like so many things associated with Nathaniel and his uncouth tattooed henchman Jack Fenton (Erroll Shand), this house within the house is at best a distastefully grotesque appropriation of the culture that rightly belongs to Mary, her twin sister (also Osborne), their mother (Mihi Te Rauhi Daniels) and grandmother (Turia Schmidt-Peke) rather than to these white pretenders, and at worst a symbol of colonial theft, rape and murder. In a sense, Mārama is a narrative of reclamation, as Mary recovers her real name and her lost whakapapa (or lineage) while seeking bloody redress from those who have wronged her and her kindred womenfolk. As such, this film is a fanciful correction of historical injustices, letting Mary walk, precisely, backwards into a better future.
In his debut feature, writer/director Taratoa Stappard is doing something similar. For he looks back to a historical period to stage and explore the tensions of identity that he himself embodies as someone who was born in Aotearoa but now lives in London, with a Māori mother and an English father. The very making of this fish-out-of-water story, itself a reconstruction and appropriation of Māori culture far from home, plays out the film’s themes, only to a more benign end. For here, toxic patriarchy finds its counterweight and comeuppance in the strength of a defiant matriarchy and sororal solidarity. And as the first in a projected trilogy of Māori gothic horror features from Stappard, this period tale of two (or three) sisters will leave you looking out (and forward) to new horizons in gothic filmmaking.
strap: Taratoa Stappard’s gothic debut feature sees a Māori woman seeking lost family history and anti-colonial revenge in Victorian England
© Anton Bitel
