Mary

Greetings from Lithuania.

"Mary" (2019) is a disappointing horror flick, even if i did not expected anyting from it. I saw at the movie theater, without knowing anything about it, were it was shown without any advertisement or anything like that - and i do understand why - because it was so poor.

Although it has an OK premise which could have turned into a good movie, unfortunately it was the writing which derailed this flick. It even stars Gary Oldman in a "give me that paycheck" role, and he was good in this film, given the material.

Overall, a nice premise couldn't save this flick from being blow average. Its not terrible, but its a poor one.

Gary Oldman what ya doing? I watched this because of you.

A very disappointing movie, considering the cast. The only thing special about "Mary" is that it is set on a sail boat. Other than that it ticks all the boxes of your standard ghost movie that you've seen a hundred times before: people behaving strangely, jump scares, a kid drawing scary pictures, pointless fake-outs in the form of dream sequences ... you can name every single overused ghost movie trope ... it's in here. Any creativity is completely absent.

The biggest mistake that the movie makes, though, is to put everything in a overarching narrative with a police interrogation that tells you right off the bat who makes it and who doesn't, evaporating every last bit of suspense that "Mary" could have created.

What's left are good performances by a good cast and decent cinematography, none of which save this movie from complete mediocrity.

What on earth is Gary Oldman doing in this very low budget and formulaic ghost story? Apart from a few cheap jump scares this is very slow and boring. It has been done better loads of times before and has very little originality.

Okay, so there's nothing new here, or particularly original, but from the get go at least there are characters on display and they are behaving believably. Makes you a little more vested in the situation as it unfolds. I don't know that the flashback structure of it helped any, but what most folks want to know is "was it scary?" or "was it stupid?" For my tastes it was involving enough, with a few creepy vibes but nothing really exceptional. I could have done without the lazy go to of repeated nightmares in order to have something unnerving happen. Make the shocks part of the story! Make them part of the situation! We lose investment if we expect every unusual occurrence to just be a harmless dream. But that being said, at least it wasn't stupid the rest of the time and I never had the urge to fast forward thru it. Entirely acceptable. But I doubt I'll ever watch it again. There needs to be an option with the streaming services between "liked" and "disliked".