Clive Tonge is from Northern England and has devoted his life to working in the film industry. While he has directed a couple of shorts, including the horror film “Sunday Best” (2011), Mara is his first feature film. Written by Jonathan Frank, Mara follows a criminal psychologist, Dr. Kate Fuller (Olga Kurylenko), as she arrives at a troubling murder site. A man is dead and it seems clear to everyone that his wife (Helena) did it. But she insists that her husband had been experiencing increasingly troubled sleep and that the night he died a “demon” entered their bedroom, sat on her husband’s chest, and choked him to death. As Kate investigates, she is led to a string of apparent strangers who have all shared the same terrifying night paralysis. More and more of them start dying inexplicably in their sleep, and soon Kate is investigating a phenomenon in which she too has become a victim.
Check out the trailer for Mara:
In an interview for Morbidly Beautiful, Tonge says Mara was influenced by two films he watched at roughly the same time: a documentary on sleep paralysis and Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998). Indeed, one of the interesting things about Mara is the way Tonge weaves the notion of contagion—central to both Ringu and the American re-make, The Ring (2002)—with the central conceit of sleep paralysis. I’ve written elsewhere about the recent surge in films about sleep disorders, including sleep paralysis—and perhaps Rodney Ascher’s The Nightmare (2015) is the documentary Tonge saw, since it has been part of this recent surge. Two horror films—Dead Awake (Phillip Guzman, 2016) and Slumber (Jonathan Hopkins, 2017)—are explicitly about sleep paralysis, and Mara makes up a triumvirate of films that treat essentially the same theme. All three of them explore the idea that the dark threatening figure so many sufferers of sleep paralysis report seeing is actually real—that it has embodied and deadly presence. And Mara is definitely the superior of these three films.
Mara is characterized by superb acting by its two leads—Olga Kurylenko as Kate and Javier Botet as Mara, the latter of whom delivers a terrifying performance every time he’s on the screen. Botet has starred in numerous horror films, including the REC series (2007-2012), Crimson Peak (2015), The Conjuring 2 (2016), and Insidious: The Last Key (2018), but his performance in Mara is definitely one of his most sustained and most chilling. Tonge’s directing and a fantastic score by James Edward Barker enhance Botet’s performance, shaping a truly unearthly creepiness in each scene of sleep paralysis.
Javier Botet as Mara
As in Dead Awake and Slumber, Mara tells the mysterious history of sleep paralysis—and the ways in which a physiological phenomenon has proliferated fearful myths since the origins of recorded human history. As a character says at one point, there’s evidence of the sleep demon from 400 BC: “Mara predates Christ.” The film also mentions the hundred or so Hmong immigrants to the US who died in their sleep in the 1970s, despite being healthy adults. When the doctor in Mara says, as if he’s giving any sort of answer, that they died from SUNDS—Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome, we realize exactly how useless science can be and that giving something an acronym doesn’t explain it.
Indeed, Mara gets exactly right why sleep paralysis is so terrifying. It is the combination of a physiological phenomenon (being partially awake while still in REM sleep, in which the body is paralyzed) with the enormous power of culture and suggestion. The best explanation for the deaths of the Hmong immigrants in the 1970s, for instance, is that they died of fear because they believed that the things they saw in their sleep were real. Mara emphasizes, more than other films about sleep paralysis, the crucial power of culture. Among other things, culture explains what people see when they experience sleep paralysis. Dr. Ellis (Mitch Eakins) says he sees Freddy Krueger, because he watched Nightmare on Elm Street as a child. (Wes Craven says he was influenced by the inexplicable deaths of Hmong immigrants in creating Freddy Krueger’s nightmare realm.) Ellis’s assistant says she sees aliens. Different generations, different experiences. “What we see in sleep paralysis is directly influenced by the culture around us,” Ellis says. Moreover, in introducing guilt as what triggers the “contagion” of the sleep demon, Mara succeeds in driving home exactly how powerful the mind can be.
Kate encounters Mara during a bout of guilt-induced sleep paralysis
Tonge is definitely a director I’ll be looking out for. And he makes an intriguing comment in his interview about his next project: “basically, it’s another in the horror genre, and it’s a post-Brexit, post-Trump suspense thriller!” I will definitely be there.
You can check out the trailer for Tonge’s short, “Sunday Best,” here:
Sunday Best trailer from clive tonge on Vimeo.
Check out my post on 10 films about sleep disorders.
Mara is now available on demand from Amazon:
