October Fright Fest: American Mary

Halloween may be one day, but I celebrate the entire month of October by watching as many horror movies as possible. Forsaking other genres for spooky, scary thrills, and filling the month with films I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in a while. So, let’s grab some popcorn, turn off the lights, and get our fright on with American Mary (2012)!

Mary Mason (Katherine Isabelle) is a promising medical student. She has the skills to be a great surgeon, but she is distracted by her money troubles. She lives in a lousy apartment and is three months behind on her cell phone bill. After she learns the restaurant where she works has closed, Mary, now desperate, is tempted to use her body to earn cash, so she applies to work at a strip club. Before the interview is over, the club’s owner, Billy Barker (Antonio Cupo), takes her to the back to fix a torture gone wrong. Billy offers Mary, who gave him her resume listing all of her education, $5000 to prevent the man from dying. This act gets the attention of Beatress (Tristan Risk) who offers Mary $10,000 to help her friend Ruby (Paula Lindberg) achieve looking like a doll. Mary takes the “this is a one-time thing” mentally and performs the radical surgery to solve her immediate money woes.

With her money troubles solved, her studies improve, and she moves on to her residency. Mary enjoys working with Dr. Walsh (Clay St. Thomas), and she is proud that she listened to her professor, Dr. Grant (David Lovgren), and didn’t mess things up. Mary trusts Walsh and Grant, she looks up to them, so when Walsh invites Mary to Grant’s place for drinks with the other surgeons, Mary is flattered and says yes. Mary doesn’t know that Walsh and Grant see themselves as talented surgeons, and since they do excellent work, they can get away with anything. They drug Mary, and Grant violates her, taping the rape to humiliate her even more.

Broken, Mary quits medical school and decides to put herself together by becoming a doctor to those who want extreme body modification. In this world, people express themselves by not settling for what God gave them. They govern how they look. Some of the procedures are amputations, forked tongues, filed teeth, and implants. Mary is numb, cold, detached, and only coming to life when she operates. She feels a rush cutting into human flesh, and her clients want her to cut into them. People reach out to her, trying to help her connect with life without a knife in her hand, but that part of her is dead and her aloofness makes her push others away. Eventually, Mary solves her problems with a scalpel, but creating situations that lead to her undoing.

Directors Jen Soska and Sylvia Soska approach the material with precision. Mary is all business. The film is lean and focused. Even when Billy fantasizes about Mary, the vision feels like the routine before a surgery: Mary moves here, then touches herself, and then pours something on her. Everything is clinical. The horror comes from Mary valuing the procedure over the person. She’s a machine who snaps on gloves and ties her black apron tight. She decided to rebuild her life by taking apart Grant, and she takes an extreme act to protect her secret. Mary has no remorse and lacks fear, with her blank eyes only coming alive when blood flows. A transformation that is frightening to watch. American Mary is a modern horror story. Only in the climate of rising education costs and the tendency to shame victims of rape can this story take place. We want to control our lives, or at least delude ourselves into thinking we have control, but one act can send us spiraling down into the dark places we try to pretend don’t exist. American Mary makes us face this reality by telling an unnerving, candid, and harrowing tale.