Review: American Mary
American Mary has an odd history with me, despite some graphic flaws in its storytelling it’s still a film I return to every October. It’s a strange type of horror movie that unsettles with a more medical style of violence and is all the more disturbing for it, being one of the few horrors to really get under my skin.
The film follows Mary Mason, a practising surgeon struggling with her finances and her studying with mentor Dr Grant constantly on her for not paying attention in class. Desperate for money Mary turns to working at a strip club and meets with owner Billy Barker for an interview, but before she’s given the job one of Billy’s workers is injured and Billy offers $5000 for emergency surgery to save his life.
Mary is left shaken by the experience but the next day she is contacted by a woman called Beatress, a stripper at Billy’s club who has had several expensive surgery procedures to look like Betty Boop, Beatress hires Mary to perform surgery on her friend who wants to resemble a Barbie Doll and can’t find a doctor on her insurance to do the procedure. Through Ruby’s website Mary is introduced to the world of extreme body modification, initially Mary is not interested but after a violent encounter with Dr Grant at a party Mary drops out of her residency and turns toward Body Mod surgery to pay her bills, quickly becoming a minor celebrity for her precision and inventiveness towards the subculture.
As mentioned earlier the story has some major flaws, it starts off fine but it quickly becomes apparent that it’s starting a bundle of plot threads but never really going anywhere with them. The revenge storyline with Dr Grant and the subsequent police investigation seems to be the main driving story but it’s barely in the film enough to warrant a mention, the police investigation especially since the officer only appears in 3 scenes in total. There is an argument to be made that the actual story is Mary’s slow corruption from victim to villain and that is there but I think if that were the case they needed to better show that downfall.
Characters were a mixed bag but then Isabelle is basically running circles around everyone, the worst offender was Detective Dolor who the film actively tries to be avoiding considering how little his investigation matters to the film as a whole. Tristen Risk as Beatress was mostly fine, I wasn’t a big fan of the character who was written a little too annoying but occasionally I thought that might have been the point with Mary never really liking Beatress in which case Risk did a good job playing such an unlikeable character.
Someone who surprised me was Antonio Cupo as Billy Barker, despite being the sleazy owner of a sleazy strip club he never came off as predatory, opportunistic yeah with him using the interviews as an excuse to see some nudity but never predatory. The more time he spent with Mary the more enticed he becomes by her, and it’s not hard to see why, she’s a mysterious girl and the first person he’s met that can converse with him without any ulterior motive, also he’s kinda scared by her. Despite having less to do as the film went on I found Billy likeable enough to stand out amongst the rest of the cast.
But the star of the show is easily Katharine Isabelle as Mary Mason, already one of the best Scream Queens around, Isabelle gives probably her best performance here with Mary utilising a natural confidence to standout. When we first meet her Mary is a little distant with few friends and money issues taking all her focus but she’s still relatively normal, she’s got a nice sarcastic wit and a naturally disgusted interest in the body mod community when she’s introduced to it. It isn’t until her incident with Dr Grant that she starts embracing the ice-queen routine, she becomes colder, more confident, sexier and more brutal with her surgeries. It’s worth noting that despite being a horror movie there’s actually not a huge body-count with Mary’s violence only directed towards one person but it’s the implication that drives her character, the feeling that with every slice, every cut and every turn towards this strange world, Mary is losing part of herself and becoming more dangerous without even realising it. Isabelle makes it easy to love Mary but she absolutely nails the darker elements of the character and is easily the highlight of the film.
The film is directed by The Soska Sisters, who also cameo as a pair of demon obsessed twins, I’ve not seen any of their other work but they’ve clearly got a heavy interest in the horror genre and despite this not being the most obvious of horror movies their influences are felt throughout. What makes the film standout is that most of the violence is only implied, often we just see the aftermath of what Mary has done to her clients and her victims, both the same type of surgery but in very different contexts and somehow both as chilling as each other.
Maybe it’s just because I’m a god fearing, peace loving man of the people but the extent to which some of Mary’s clients go and some of the procedures we see were enough to make my skin crawl, it’s not even real horror and yet I constantly felt uneasy at watching the screen and that is impressive in its own way. The rest of the film didn’t have that same level of dread but the Soska’s used a level of black humour to contrast against unsettling surgery, it’s more pronounced in the first half of the film with Mary’s reaction to the world of Body Mods being humorous in its disbelief and even when things got darker the humour was still there but it becomes rarer the longer the film goes on.
I’m still unsure what makes me coming back to American Mary, the story is too much of a fleeting mess that goes nowhere and falls apart in the ending and seriously harms the film as a result. But for genre fans it’s Katharine Isabelle’s cold-as-ice and villainous performance and The Soska’s unsettling attitude towards surgical violence that stands out as something worth checking out. It’s far from perfect but it’s interesting and unique enough to stand on its own.
7/10