Film Fests
[REVIEW] Fantastic Fest 2025: ‘Mārama’ Is a Lush Gothic Expression of Colonialism’s Scars
Take it from the pastiest British person you know: the history of Britain is not an exclusively white history. That feels important to reiterate right now at a time when right-wing idiots are painting St. George’s flags all over England and spewing nonsense about taking “their” country back. The nation so concerned with immigration today once plunged its greedy fingers into every pocket of the world, pilfering its riches, ransacking cultures, and dragging people from their homes. Some of those people found a new home—willingly or otherwise—in the British Isles, yet they are so often left out of our history as to become invisible. Set in Victorian England, Mārama, the debut feature of writer-director Taratoa Stappard, shines a bright spotlight on the colonial scars that Britain likes to pretend are long-since healed, if it acknowledges them at all, revealing that they’re very much still bleeding.
A Warm Smile Hides a Hungry Eye
Mārama opens with a shot of a woman with fresh cuts on her chin. Anyone possessing even a passing familiarity with Māori culture will likely recognize this for what it is—not the aftermath of an attack, but an act of defiance, a freshly chiseled moko kauae tattoo. We’re then introduced to our protagonist, the eponymous Mārama (Ariāna Osborne), a young Māori woman who was given the anglicized name “Mary” by the European couple that adopted her after she was orphaned. She’s just made the arduous 73-day journey from Aotearoa to North Yorkshire, England, after receiving a letter from a man claiming to know something of her heritage.
Unfortunately, after a not-so-friendly welcome from the locals, Mārama discovers that the man who summoned her has died. With few other options, she reluctantly accepts a job offer from whaling tycoon Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens), who is looking for a governess for his niece, Anna (Evelyn Towersey).
The Facade of Cultural Appreciation in Mārama
Stephens initially portrays Cole as a warm and enlightened man with a deep appreciation for Mārama’s culture. He speaks the Māori language. His mansion is filled with Māori artifacts. But the warning signs are there from the start: a passing reference to the Māori people as “specimens;” a painting depicting the white man taming the “savages” on his wall. The deeper Mārama ventures into the stately home and grounds, the clearer it becomes that Cole’s proclaimed appreciation disguises appropriation in its darkest form: he takes whatever he wants, even that which is most sacred, most personal, and reduces it to mere decoration, to costume.
Stappard layers nuance into this portrait of colonial greed by contrasting Mārama’s experience with that of Cole’s servant, Peggy (Umi Myers), also a woman of color but not Māori. Peggy at first resents Mārama’s seemingly cushy existence in the house, highlighting the barriers to solidarity that can make it harder for marginalized groups to stand up to shared enemies. It’s all oppression, and of a kind that is especially heightened for women, but Cole’s fetishization of the Māori culture creates all-new avenues for objectification and harm.
Biting Back a Cry of Defiance
Osborne embues Mārama with quiet dignity and simmering rage as she navigates this perverse mirror of the culture she has been torn from. Combined with the oppressive, uneasy scoring from Karl Sölve Steven and Rob Thorne, her performance leaves the audience with a sick feeling in the pit of our stomachs. By the time we’re introduced to “Uncle Jacky” (Erroll Shand), a slimy white man with moko kanohi (Māori facial tattoos, symbolic of a person’s ancestry and achievements), we flinch at the sight right along with Mārama. We’re more than ready for her to burn the whole house down, but Stappard has more evils to unpack before granting any relief, including one devastating third-act reveal that will knock the breath out of you.
The horror in Mārama is quiet and understated, but the impact is profound. Stappard taps into staple elements of the jump scare industry as his hero experiences flashes of the terrible truth through frightening visions and dreams, but these are rarely accompanied by the typical jolting music stings. The lack of score in certain scenes leaves us to sit in our discomfort, but it also allows us to experience the full impact of Mārama’s defiance when she finally snaps and fights back, reclaiming her power and embracing her heritage. Osborne’s performance is simply transcendent, aching with pain and fury and a deep longing for everything that has been taken from her. This is “good for her” horror at its finest, and when the moment comes, it’s as cathartic as it is bittersweet.
The Perfect Evolution of Gothic Horror
Indigenous horror is still a relatively untapped well as a new generation of filmmakers fight for their seat at a table that wasn’t built with them in mind. Mārama is a shining example of all the stories that badly need to be told, and all the ways that the subgenres we love can benefit from an injection of fresh blood. The world that Stappard conjures is richly realized, with all its striking architecture and lush period costumes, inky shadows, and deep, bloody reds. It serves as a stark reminder of what Gothic horror does best: reveal that which has been repressed, forgotten but not silenced, demanding to be brought into the light.
Corpus
Corrin Evans premiered her debut feature film Corpus at Fantasia Film Festival.
Corpus is a steamy thriller set in 1997 New York, which follows a group of friends who travel to a remote mansion for a party, though what they find is not quite what they expected.
Intimacy and consent are at the heart of this film. The characters often long for and lust after each other, and Evans makes sure that the audience feels every breath and every touch. The film looks exquisite, thanks in part to cinematographer Charlie Cole. Together they designed a lighting setup using either natural lighting or very hot tungsten lights (which added to the steamy aesthetic). “I just love the body,” explained Evans at the world premiere in Montreal. “I knew I wanted it to feel very visceral and flowing from the gut, like you’re really with these characters up close. I wanted to be able to feel skin and pores.”
Having worked as an intimacy coordinator for several years, Evans brought her industry experience to both the story and her directing choices. Co-writer and actor Lily Cowles (who plays Billie in the film) praised Evans for her directing style. “I’ve often thought the reason that you’re a good director is the same reason you’re a good intimacy coordinator.” Cowles continued, adding that “when you’re on set, there’s a level of safety and an openness, and you can really trust that Corrin’s going to keep you in that pocket.”
So much of Corpus was crafted by the hands of the cast and the crew. Many of the effects were done practically (including one devastating moment that we will not spoil here), and the main location – an old mansion – was dressed and designed to feel authentically lived in. Even the score, composed by VAAAL (pronounced like wall with a v), was created using an organic process. “ I’ve been wanting to work with him forever,” explained Evans about their collaboration. “He’s an insane musician.”
Corpus will leave your skin crawling in all the best possible ways.
Castration Movie Chapter iii.ii Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage
Louise Weard showcased an excerpt from the third part of her anthology epic Castration Movie at Fantasia Film Festival last month.
Weard’s epic anthology film is all about exploring “trans-temporality”, as she explained to the Fantasia crowd. “Your timeline gets so skewed in an interesting way, where transition becomes this benchmark.” Her original intent was to release one long 24h film as a way to reclaim that lost time, so to speak. She uses her family’s digital camcorder to shoot everything and uses tapes of her as a child to record and re-record her footage. She writes, directs, shoots, and edits everything, often exploring very dark topics.
While this may sound intimidating on paper, Weard writes with a vicious sense of humor, and has an excellent sense of how to balance sincerity with cringe. This particular section focuses its story on a romantic couple as one partner transitions. Weard’s excerpt produced maybe the most visceral reactions of the festival, with audience members actively heckling one of the onscreen characters during the film’s final act. While previous chapters have featured both graphic and sexually explicit content, this part focused instead on a kind of deep emotional trauma that is usually left to the most toxic of internet forums.
“This movie is my parody of Lawrence Anyways,” quipped Weard (who is trans herself) as the audience was still reeling from the film. She went on to explain how often trans stories are told from the perspective of the cis gaze, that the narrative arc focuses on how a cis person feels about another person’s transness. Weard’s camera work often zooms into the cis partner’s eyes as they watch their trans partner go about their day. “We’re going to really put that gaze under the microscope, almost literally in terms of how zoomed in we are on those eyes. And I think it creates a horror atmosphere in a lot of ways.”
The full scope of Castration Movie is yet to be revealed. Castration Movie Anthology i: Traps has a daunting runtime of 4h 35m, while Castration Movie Anthology ii: The Best of Both Worlds runs 5h. The excerpt presented at Montreal’s International Fantasia Festival ran 2h 10m, though Weard plans to release the full Castration Movie Anthology iii: Year of the Hyaena later this year, and is already working on an Anthology IV and V. “I like to think of it at this point like show running. Because it’s been literally nonstop production for coming up on four years. I’ve been shooting every weekend for four years.”
Weard was working as a PA when she started shooting her film, but “unfortunately, I kept running out of money,” she laughed, and of course the 2023 writer’s strike did not help her situation. She decided to release segments of her film to raise funds so she could keep shooting. With this specific 2h segment, Weard hopes to bring more audiences into her universe. “This gets to be the easy access point where someone can demo the castration movie experience for just two hours and decide if they want to commit to the whole 24-hour endeavor,” she chuckled.
After the immense success of their sophomore film I Saw The TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun returns to the big screen this month with their highly anticipated third film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The film is a true celebration of queerness, self-exploration, and the joys of breaking free.
Hannah Einbinder stars as Kris, an awkward, queer indie filmmaker tasked with reviving the ‘problematic’ slasher franchise Camp Miasma. In order to chip away at her writer’s block, she travels to the snow covered camp that inspired the franchise to meet Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive star of the initial film. Jack Haven, who captivated audiences as Maddy in I Saw The TV Glow, plays the mesmerizing, mischievous slasher villain Little Death, a figure who haunts both Kris and Billy as they uncover the mysteries of the camp.
“I remember being like, ‘It is very important in the very first scene of the movie that there’d be a huge fucking geyser of blood,’” Schoenbrun told Deadline at Cannes this year. Schoenbrun felt it was important that Camp Miasma differentiate itself from the painful sadness of I Saw The TV Glow. “With this, I want people to feel like we’re hanging out. We’re sharing a joint on the porch and eating candy and talking about real things.”
Photo Credit: Charles-Antoine Marcotte
Fantasia Film Festival Highlights the Power of Queer Community Filmmaking
The ‘hang-out-vibe’ was just as important behind the scenes as it was on screen. Following the film’s Canadian premiere at Montreal’s International Fantasia Film Festival, Schoenbrun spoke at a panel alongside Einbinder, Avalon Fast, Louise Weard, and Alice Maio Mackay (Fast and Weard both appear in Camp Miasma, Weard and Mackay both had films screening at the festival). The group talked about friendship and the importance of community filmmaking. Fast confirmed that they’d been filming footage for a behind the scenes documentary about the making of Camp Miasma, and everyone expressed delight at being able to make art alongside each other.
“One of the biggest obstacles we have is that trans people don’t get hired on set very often, which thankfully all of us have corrected within our production capacities, on our sets specifically,” said Weard when talking about her own project, Castration Movie. When the question came up of making radical queer art under a capitalist umbrella, Weard continued, laughing that “any success we get, beyond our community that we’re making [our art] for, is just siphoning money from the bourgeois class, and then giving it out to other trans people, trans artists, people who need their rent paid, whatever.”
Jane Schoenbrun on Making Trans Art Without Creative Expectations
The conversation also delved into the intrinsic pressure of ‘needing’ to make art about trans/queerness as a trans/queer artist. “You’re making trans films if you’re trans” said Schoenbrun, while explaining there was no specific need to make all of one’s art about one’s own transness. “Cis dudes, they’re not like ‘how do I make a movie about being a cis dude?’ They’re just like ‘it’s the ~ ~ mafia ~ ~ ‘,” they laughed.
“Such a big part of how I taught myself to make movies was just being like, oh yeah, I know this grocery store.” With Camp Miasma, Schoenbrun continues to rely on the familiar, in the best possible way. “It’s X-Files and Twin Peaks, you know? Those are my primary reference points.” Camp Miasma is indeed loaded with references to many beloved franchises, including Sleepaway Camp, Friday the 13th, and Videodrome, though knowing those intellectual properties is far from necessary (everything is spelled out in the title). Nor is the film an ironic nod or a parody of those properties. “We were really thinking about how it felt like as a kid to watch those things [scary movies],” Schoenbrun explained at the Cannes premiere.
How Camp Miasma Blends Slasher Horror With Surreal Visual Storytelling
Every penny of the relatively small budget was clearly put to use making this film. There is a gorgeous opening sequence filled with artifacts that explain the lore behind the fictional Miasma franchise, and there is an impressive killing spree that was shot in one take and set to “A Long December” by Counting Crows. “It’s still probably the hardest thing I’ve had to do as an actor, just in terms of physical intensity,” Haven told Deadline back in May. Schoenbrun and cinematographer Eric Yue nailed the slasher aesthetic, often using dramatic shadows and buckets of blood, but they also create truly beautiful, surrealist landscapes that heighten the emotional drama swirling around the two main characters.
Why Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma Is One of Jane Schoenbrun’s Best Films
With Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun cements their reputation as both a must see filmmaker and a sharp writer. Their work consistently nails the feelings and complexities of relationships rooted in our very online world, starting with their debut feature We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (which premiered at a virtual Sundance due to the COVID-19 pandemic). There’s a stickiness that’s unique to Schoenbrun’s writing. Certain phrases ring so right, they feel like they could open a portal to a new universe. They often do!
Camp Miasma blurs the lines between nightmare and fantasy, and taps into a feeling horror fans know all too well. “It’s such a joyful thing” expressed Schoenbrun at the Fantasia panel, about making films with their peers. “You make these things to share with people.” There is a carnal thrill to feeling scared from the comfort of one’s own home, and Schoenbrun feeds that feeling to their characters. As Gillian Anderson’s Billy whispers with a knowing smile, life is all about two things; flesh and fluids.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens in theaters on August 7th
