THE LAST THING MARY SAW (2021)

Studio:      Shudder
Director:    Edoardo Vitaletti
Writer:      Edoardo Vitaletti
Producer:  Isen Robbins, Aimee Schoof, Harrison Allen, Madeleine Schumacher, B. Stephen Tedeschi Jr.
Stars:     Stefanie Scott, Isabelle Fuhrman, Judith Roberts, P.J. Sosko, Carolyn McCormick, Michael Laurence, Elijah Rayman, Stephen Lee Anderson, Rory Culkin

Review Score:

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Summary:

Strange events befall a farming family in 1843 when their daughter becomes involved in an illicit affair with a servant.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

CHAPTER I – THE TEMPLE OF EARTHLY DESIRES

In the New York village of Southold in 1843, Randolph and his wife Agnes inform the matriarch of their extended farming family that their daughter Mary is in a forbidden lesbian love affair with their servant Eleanor. Randolph and Agnes ask for the matriarch’s intervention to teach the two young women a lesson.

Following the matriarch’s instructions, Agnes summons her brother Eustace’s family to the farm. Eustace and his wife Ann agree to take Eleanor as their servant to separate her from Mary, but only if the women first undergo a painful “correction” that involves reciting prayers at length while kneeling.

Mary’s curious little brother Matthew asks his cousin about Mary’s punishment. Eustace’s son likens Mary and Eleanor’s ordeal to that of Theodore, a man who tried to escape the farm, but was forced to become its disabled guard as a consequence of his disobedience.

Believing the guard will be sympathetic because of his own fear of the family, Eleanor bargains to bring Theodore bread in exchange for allowing Mary and Eleanor to secretly see each other in the chicken coop at night. However, Eustace becomes suspicious of Eleanor’s additional baking and forces her to undergo another correction. As a result, Theodore breaks off their arrangement, but instructs Eleanor to make one last loaf that he intends to poison so he can escape.

Randolph tells his wife that he fears the consequences of continuing with the corrections. Agnes is confused by what her husband means, but Randolph remains cryptic.

Theodore gives poison to Eleanor to kill the chickens as part of a plot to frighten the family. Mary suggests simply running away, but Eleanor refuses to live her life in hiding.

In the coop, Eleanor reads aloud to Mary from a small book she stole from Randolph. The strange stories eerily mirror recent events related to their relationship.

Matthew leaves the house to spy on his sister, but Eustace’s son follows Matthew’s trail and alerts the elders. The women catch Matthew spying on them when the matriarch suddenly interrupts. After a brief blackout, Mary sees a terrifying vision in which the matriarch levitates Eleanor and puts nails in her throat while Matthew repeats prayers in a trance.

Randolph finds the chickens dead and discovers that Eleanor is now mute. Randolph also finds the poison, but he replaces it in Eleanor’s unconscious hand.

Randolph tells the matriarch about his forbidden book and how it spoke of things that could bring death to the family. Randolph further reveals that someone stole the book and he fears what will happen next, so he recommends removing Eleanor immediately.

Eleanor puts the poison in the matriarch’s tea. Mary later finds the matriarch dead.

CHAPTER II – A MONSTROUS BIRTH

While the family mourns the matriarch with a vow of silence, an intruder with a deformed face arrives outside claiming he was summoned to deliver replacement chickens for dinner. Theodore passes a pouch of poison to the intruder and asks him to give it to Eleanor when he delivers the food to the kitchen.

Upon meeting Eleanor, the intruder tells her about the history behind his scarred face, which mirrors a tale from Randolph’s book. The intruder recounts how a doctor once told his mother to murder him due to his deformity, but the intruder instead killed his mother and extorted the doctor for money. Continuing his story about bargaining, the intruder implies he will only give Eleanor the poison pouch if she gives him something in return. The intruder rapes Eleanor.

The mourners see the matriarch’s forefinger twitching repeatedly while lying in repose. One of the men moves to cut off her finger, but the commotion in the kitchen causes a distraction. The corpse’s finger later turns black.

The intruder asks to take a loaf of bread. Eleanor points him to the loaf she poisoned. When the intruder goes to grab it, Eleanor stabs his hand. The intruder calls Eleanor a whore, takes the bread, and leaves.

Eleanor shows Mary she acquired the poison pouch. The two women embrace, but Eustace’s son catches them in the act and reports them to the elders.

CHAPTER III – THE LADY OF BETHABARA

Eleanor is forced to do another correction while the family eats dinner together. Mary poisons everyone’s tea except for Matthew’s. However, Randolph objects to the boy putting sugar in his tea and forces Matthew to switch cups with him.

Matthew violently drops dead first, followed by everyone else in the family except Randolph. Mary and Eleanor embrace, but Mary becomes mortified when she sees her dead brother. Mary tells Randolph that Matthew’s death was caused by their family’s silence as well as their corrections.

The intruder returns and suddenly shoots Randolph dead. The intruder reveals he used the poisoned bread to kill Theodore and stole his gun so he could come back for revenge. The intruder then uses the second and final bullet to kill Eleanor.

After the initial shock of her lover’s death, Mary demands to know who originally summoned the intruder to the house since everyone was under a vow of silence. The resurrected matriarch unexpectedly appears behind Mary. The matriarch tells Mary it would be misguided to fight her and that they must instead draw inspiration from the book her father brought into the house.

The matriarch forces Mary to read the last story in the book. The fable tells of a noblewoman and a female servant who murdered an old woman they feared could expose their love affair. Divine intervention supposedly resurrected the woman, and she built a house devoted to God on the site of her death where anyone who dared to desecrate the home would pay a heavy toll. The old lady drowned the servant and blinded the noblewoman. After Mary finishes reading, the matriarch slowly gouges out her eyes.

Constables later find Mary as the only survivor. After recounting her unbelievable story to an interrogator, Mary is hanged. The interrogator stares fearfully at the small book he recovered from Mary.

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Review:

I skipped right over “The Last Thing Mary Saw” when I first skimmed through the Fantasia International Film Festival’s 2021 program guide. The still image accompanying its listing simply showed two women standing solemnly in bonnets and smocks with an oil lamp lit behind them. The summary mentioned maids, the year 1843, and a “repressively religious household.” Additional color from the copywriter described the movie as an “artfully wrought” tale of “young women victimized by the prejudices of a bygone era” that featured “lengthy stretches without dialogue.”

When I make my initial pass through any film festival lineup, I look for titles that stand out and wow me, or else earn intrigue by seeming like they have something distinctive in store. “The Last Thing Mary Saw” didn’t do either of those things. Decoding the description above, the movie sounded like a sleepy period piece whose portfolio invests exclusively in quiet mood, and funds it by taxing a bored audience’s patience. In other words: an atmosphere-intensive chamber play filled with straining violin music, overcast skies, copious candlelight, and sullen-faced folks with names like Agnes and Eleanor.

A press release prompted me to reconsider waving my hand with casual disregard. In my quickness to dismiss the movie as more “meh” than “must see,” I missed that the cast included Rory Culkin and Isabelle Fuhrman. While not a guaranteed home run hitter, Culkin typically chooses peculiar parts, or at least indie projects that often come from off the beaten path. Fuhrman will forever be a genre queen for her impossible-to-forget performance in “Orphan.” I additionally realized that the aforementioned copywriter was Michael Gingold, the former Fangoria mainstay whose insightful writing cemented him as an essential voice in entertainment journalism. Suddenly, the reputations behind these names bulked up “The Last Thing Mary Saw’s” potential with heft that was harder to ignore. Now I noticed terms such as “occult,” “mysterious death,” and “ageless forces” peppering the synopsis. My interest wasn’t just piqued. “The Last Thing Mary Saw” had unexpectedly vaulted high enough to become one of my most anticipated titles of Fantasia.

Alas, that fire was quite quickly extinguished within minutes of the movie getting underway. That impression I’d invented in my mind of the starched-turtleneck slow-burner I feared “The Last Thing Mary Saw” might be? That’s precisely the movie it is.

Suspicions of stuffiness are immediately validated when the film opens on a quote (already a negative sign) from John Calvin, the 16th-century French theologian who played a key role in the Protestant Reformation. “The Last Thing Mary Saw” then doubles up its effort to emulate the presentation of musty leather literature by separating acts with intertitle chapter headings.

After employing bookend pieces that frame the film as a flashback, we learn from her concerned parents that young Mary is in an illicit relationship with the family’s housemaid Eleanor. This sequence chooses a poor position to introduce the relationship driving the premise because, without first meeting both women or having an opportunity to watch love develop between them, their bond is only a spoken-not-seen device to set the plot into motion.

When we do finally see them in the same room, Eleanor and Mary are in the midst of being punished with prayer, which again defines the women by what their affair means to the family, not by who they are to each other. Peculiarly, the camera even cuts to a first-person perspective of Mary’s little brother spying on this religious “correction,” suggesting that what the boy is personally witnessing is more important than the pain being inflicted upon the women. This is objectively counterintuitive camera placement that confuses whose tale it is that “The Last Thing Mary Saw” wishes to tell.

Mary and Eleanor continue serving as props instead of as people. The disapproving aunts, uncles, and cousins around them become an interchangeable mass of condescending frowns and offscreen whispers. Being brooding, pensive, and often silent does not directly prohibit characters from creating charisma capable of attracting a viewer’s attention. But this script seems to think anemic affectation is unavoidable. Because none of these entities exhibit anything close to a quantifiable personality, the movie never develops one either.

Given the film’s setting and summary, reasonable expectations probably anticipate a witchcraft element, which is commonplace in such scenarios. Those hungry for horror however, will find that “The Last Thing Mary Saw” has none for quite a long while.

An occult aspect eventually takes shape, although it doesn’t take center stage. “The Last Thing Mary Saw” instead maintains a tone that’s traditionally suited for mainstream melodrama. A wicked little ending gets more than a little macabre, but by then we’ve overdosed on enough shots of grazing chickens and bearded men brandishing books that we’re too comatose too care.

“The Last Thing Mary Saw” is very much a film for genre festival attendees who want something studious to discuss over lattes after indulging in a steadier diet of carnage and comedy. A less polite likening would classify “The Last Thing Mary Saw” as a movie your mother’s knitting circle would talk about if they watched horror movies instead of reading Oprah’s book club selections.

I’m not one to use the worn-out phrase “brings nothing new to the table,” although I’d like to use it here for simplicity’s sake. Recent cinema has seen an influx of more meaningful films that explore intolerant oppression, especially as applied to same-sex relationships, and especially in depictions of earlier eras of patriarchal persecution. Purely on a production level, “The Last Thing Mary Saw” looks good, and its intentions are too. But what is unique about it that would make anyone pay attention to a story we’ve seen told before with more emotionally captivating content? The dreary drama of “The Last Thing Mary Saw” is drier than an August afternoon in Palm Springs, except without any of the heat that might memorably scorch your skin.

Review Score: 45

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