Horror Movie Review: Haunting of the Mary Celeste (2020)

The Mary Celeste was an American merchant brigantine discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores Islands on December 4, 1872. Why it was deserted has remained a mystery to today and around its story has arisen fantastical theories.

Directed by Shana Betz and written by Jerome Olivier and David Ross. It’s the unexplained mystery of the ship that Haunting of the Mary Celeste bases its story on.

An intriguing idea, there’s so many unknown things around the true story to create something quite clever but sadly, that is not the case with Haunting of the Mary Celeste. It is nothing but a shallow and bland ghostly goings-on movie that feels far longer than it actually is.

It is disappointing, but it is consistently disappointing. From the story to the characters, to the acting and direction, to the visuals and the scares… it never rises above mediocre.

We’re introduced to Rachel (Emily Swallows) who is every obsessed, no-nonsense academic researcher ever. You’ve seen her character in a thousand horror movies and she is as boring as every other one.

She is obsessed with the Mary Celeste and believes she knows what happened to the crew. Her theory relates to rifts in the space-time continuum caused by tectonic plates shifting. She has reason to believe that the location of where the Mary Celeste was found is where a rift occurred and it’s about to happen again soon. Her plan is to go out there with her two assistants and capture/study the phenomena.

A solid enough idea, it needs deeper explanations but this film isn’t giving them. Just go with it, it’s the only original thing in the movie.

Of course, to get there, she needs a boat. Finding that her original arrangement has fallen through, she manages to convince a sceptical ship captain named Tulls (Richard Roundtree) to take them.

The small ship is where the majority of film takes place and as they get closer to the co-ordinates, strange events begin to happen. At first, it’s absorbing as the film allows your imagination to fill in some of the blanks. Unfortunately, it ends up replacing that with mind-numbing attempts to explain itself. All done by characters you won’t care about at all.

To make matters worse, the erratic ‘ghostly’ behaviour just gets confusing as characters are picked off at random with very little reasoning. That it rarely results in anything that could be called scary is surprising. Especially as the small, cramped and dark location of the small ship seemed tailor-made for some good frights.

Simply put, by the time the finale of the movie is reached, most will have abandoned this ship too.