American Mary

Directed by Jen and Sylvia Soska, American Mary follows medical student Mary Mason (Katharine Isabelle) as she turns to body modification as a way of earning money on the side – with complications ensuing as Mary’s drawn further and further into this seedy world. It’s a decidedly twisted setup that is, at the outset, employed to promising effect by the filmmaking siblings, with the impressively cinematic atmosphere, coupled with the strong performances and inclusion of several cringe-inducing moments, going a long way towards compensating for the movie’s obvious low budget. (The most apparent stumbling block in the film’s early stages is an ongoing emphasis on needlessly surreal elements, as the Soskas pepper the storyline with asides that wouldn’t seem out of place within a David Lynch flick.) The rough-around-the-edges vibe becomes more and more problematic as American Mary stumbles into its meandering midsection, however, as the overlong running time has been padded out with tangentially-related subplots that aren’t terribly compelling or interesting. The almost excessively uneven narrative does, in the end, cancel out the effectiveness of the film’s positive attributes, and it’s finally impossible to label the movie as anything more than a sporadically intriguing yet distressingly half-baked horror endeavor (ie this probably would’ve worked better as a short).

** out of ****