Fantasia Festival 2021 presents The Last Thing Mary Saw, arriving on Shudder on the 20th of January 2022.
To fully understand the puritanical world of Edoardo Vitaletti’s atmospheric religious horror, we need to take a trip back to England around 1650, where Charles I of England lies rotting in a grave, his head unceremoniously detached from his body following the English Civil War. The country was held firmly in the grip of a Lord Protector named Oliver Cromwell. However, by 1657, Cromwell’s grip was weakening, as brave new voices defied his puritanical religious beliefs, and many called for a return to monarchy. By 1658, he was dead, allowing the air of change to build further.
This period was brilliantly explored in Thomas Clay’s exceptional Fanny Lye Deliver’d, and in many ways, Edoardo Vitaletti’s The Last Thing Mary Saw feels like a continuation of Clay’s story. As England changed, many Puritans boarded ships in Plymouth, keen to reestablish religious communities in the new world of the United States. These communities would thrive right up to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, with their ideologies lasting much longer. It is within these years of isolation that The Last Thing Mary Saw opens.
The year is 1843, and the place is rural New York. Mary (Stefanie Scott) is sitting quietly, her face covered in dried blood, a blindfold covering the holes where her eyes once rested; the candlelit room she inhabits is an interrogation chamber as two law enforcers probe her story. But what tragedy led to Mary’s predicament?
Mary begins to recount the events that led to this pain in her puritanical family, led by a stone-faced matriarch (Judith Roberts). Bound by a set of religious rules that nobody dared break from the youngest to the oldest, Mary hid a forbidden love for the housemaid, Eleanor (Isabelle Fuhrman). Her story is the darkest of tales born from hidden love, torment and religious control, as a mysterious stranger (Rory Culkin) arrives and turns the darkest of family homes upside down.
The Last Thing Mary Saw – Photo Credit: Shudder
Unlike many pre-American Civil War horrors, The Last Thing Mary Saw never languishes in many of its contemporaries’ tried and tested witch hunts, including the recent Fear Street. Instead, Vitaletti focuses on the power of religion in maintaining control, its tight grip, allowing few options for escape for either Mary or Eleanor. Just like Thomas Clay, Vitaletti focuses on the human repercussions of puritanical control, with Mary and Eleanor forced to consider escape routes they know are shrouded in darkness, their final solution a toxic mix of love, revenge, and desperation.
Folk horror runs through the veins of this dark tale, but it is here where Vitaletti’s screenplay occasionally stumbles as it attempts to mix its human horror with something more ethereal. However, despite a few trips, the understated central performances of Scott and Furhman are enthralling alongside the absolutely chilling matriarch Roberts creates. For some, The Last Thing Mary Saw will lack the visual horror they desire, but others will gobble up its tension like a delicious three-course meal, and while it may not quite reach the heights of Thomas Clay’s Fanny Lye Deliver’d or the sumptuously complex The Righteous, Vitaletti’s directorial debut is impressive.
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