American Mary (2013)

American Mary arrives from 2012, courtesy of the Soska sisters, Jen and Sylvia, who wrote and directed a body horror picture about a destitute surgical student who pays her tuition by stitching up the underground. Katharine Isabelle plays Mary Mason with a frost that curdles into something considerably worse. The film opens with a strip club basement, a bleeding man, and five thousand dollars in cash, and it never quite recovers its composure. That is meant as praise.

The engine here is anger, and it is gendered. Mary is drugged and raped by a former teacher at what she believed was a professional networking party, and the second half is a slow, methodical answer to that crime. Reviewers at the time reached for the phrase feminist conviction, and the shoe fits. The hospital is a predatory economy, the strip club is another, and tuition debt is the lever that pries Mary loose from her respectable future. This is a revenge narrative with a scalpel, and the scalpel is held by a woman who has stopped asking permission. The film also treats extreme modification as a question of self-determination, granting its marginalized patients a dignity the plot refuses to give its doctors.

Where the film declines to travel is instructive. There is no engagement with race, none with climate, none with neurodivergence, and no attempt to read the modification subculture through a queer lens. The picture concerns gender, bodies, and institutional abuse, and it stays there. The politics are baked into the horror instead of recited over it, which keeps the sermonizing to a minimum. Casting actual members of the modification community lends the milieu a texture no prosthetics budget could buy. The result is a nasty, committed piece of work with a clear grievance and a limited appetite for explaining itself. It earns its anger. It does not lecture us about it.