Mara is a horror film that was released in 2018. It was directed by Clive Tonge from a screenplay provided by Jonathan Frank. Olga Kurylenko leads a cast that includes Craig Conway, Javier Botet, Rosie Fellner, and Lance E. Nichols. So the idea of the film is based on some myth about a sleep demon. Mara apparently preys on those with guilty secrets. so he choice of victims is aplenty.
Kurylenko plays a criminal psychologist who is asked to look at a situation where a wife seems to have killed her husband in an unusual and gruesome fashion. As her investigation progresses, she finds herself in the group of sleep paralysis and a frightening female figure lurches around making strange clicking noises and asthmatic hisses or something.
This is just another B movie with an interesting idea as the main story. The performances are fine. The writing is fair. It is reminiscent of some of the Japanese horror films I have seen in recent decades. The visual effects are creepy enough, but that doesn’t seem so hard for these studios these days.
I ended up not hating this film, which is an accomplishment of sorts, because it did sort of introduce to me a previously unfamiliar peace of folklore. The film was mildly engaging but only just barely.
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