MĀRAMA After Dark

Taratoa Stappard’s haunting and visceral debut feature — a gothic revenge horror filtered through a Māori lens — melds the chills of a haunted house thriller with a stark exploration of Britain’s dark colonial legacy. In 1859, Mary Stevens (Āriana Osborne), a young Māori teacher, is summoned from New Zealand (Aotearoa) to North Yorkshire, lured by the promise of discovering her family’s history. Arriving alone in a strange and distant land, Mary is welcomed by local landowner Sir Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens), a former whaler with an ostensible love for Aotearoa and its people. But when Mary reluctantly accepts a position as a live-in governess for Cole’s young granddaughter, she soon starts to see haunting visions imbued with traces her own history, and it becomes apparent that the manor house Cole inhabits contains more than even the stolen Māori heirlooms and treasures hidden within. Eschewing simple jump scares in favor of a slow burn reveal, Stappard builds an atmosphere of dread which percolates through the oppressive corridors of the English manor, where the clash between Victorian artifice and appropriated images of indigenous spirituality spawns an uncanny tension that haunts every moment of the film. Osborne’s impressive performance perfectly embodies Mary’s journey from passive observer to empowered Māori wahine on a righteous revenge mission, as her search for identity soon becomes a visceral fight for freedom, dignity and a reckoning with the legacy of colonialism itself. –Abbie Algar