Review of Mary

This movie had a great trailer. Gary Oldman & Emily Mortimer, 2 great actors in a ghost story on a small ship at sea. It looked really good. Unfortunately the movie was tragically flawed because of a clumsy framing device. Not a spoiler since it hits you in the 1st 2 minutes of the film: They start out with the "after it happened" thing with Emily Mortimer on shore after the "tragedy at sea" and being interrogated by the FBI. The movie is then told in flashback. If this was not bad enough, at multiple times in the movie, just as tension is building they CUT BACK TO THE INTERROGATION, effectively killing the suspense. The "payoff" that the interrogation sequence builds up to is completely not worth it. The movie, in my opinion, would be immensely better if they just cut out ALL of the after the fact interrogation stuff and just played it with the straight in the moment stuff. It like if Kubrick opened The Shining with Shelley Duvall being questioned by local Police after the events at the Overlook asking her if she did something to her husband, and then cut back to this every 10 minutes or so throughout the film. We would not be remembering The Shining as a classic of suspense horror today if they had taken this ham-handed route.