MARA

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Unusually, I've watched almost zero new horror movies so far this year. Apart from new cinema releases, most of 2019's DVD and streaming choices have been older titles, non-genre films and date predominantly from the 1950s. But with the FrightFest hoving into view at the end of the month, it seemed like a good idea to ease my way back in to modern genre movies with a few interesting looking rentals. And the first thing to drop through the letterbox is... entirely average, not bad, no masterpiece, competent enough and I guarantee this time next week I'll have forgotten all about it. Which is fine: not every horror movie can be a game-changing masterpiece that redefines the genre for a generation.

Mara is a fairly ordinary horror movie in which police psychologist Olga Kurylenko is called in to assess the sanity of murder suspects when they claim the killings were actually carried out by a demon witch creature named Mara when her victims were suffering from sleep paralysis - a genuine condition that apparently occurs midway between awake and asleep. Is she real? Or is she a combination of urban legend and modern popular culture? And what can Kurylenko do when she finds she's been marked as Mara's next victim?

It would be easy, and frankly unfair to dismiss a movie about sleep paralysis as something that induces precisely that. In fact it's perfectly alright: an unremarkable mid-range DTV horror that does its job efficiently enough and doesn't waste much time about it. Javier Botet gets to do his weird spindly body-twisting again, and there's the twist ending so inevitable it would be more of a shock if they didn't have one. Really, the worst you can say about it is that it doesn't do anything you haven't seen before (it even has the brass nerve to namecheck Freddy Krueger and The X-Files), but it does its recycling solidly enough for a Friday night rental if you keep your expectations modest.

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