This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Memorable, crazy movie

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

American Mary is billed as a movie about a medic who turns her back on the medical establishment and becomes involved in underground surgery for paying customers, who wish to have surgery the establishment would refuse. For obvious reasons as its mainly for shallow aesthetic reasons.It is well known that there are groups of people who demand surgery to change their appearance for any number of reasons but standing in their way is a medical establishment which refuses on ethical grounds. Why remove healthy tissue for aesthetic reasons? It seems that this wish fulfilment of a trained surgeon who will perform this type of surgery on demand, if you are rich enough, resulted in the character of Mary. She is basically a body-mod kinksters dream come true. It it doesn't take long for us to see the movie for what it is. It's a thinly veiled revenge movie against the medical establishment, most likely because they refuse to get involved with surgery this scene, where the supposed hero is much worse than her prey. The writers and directors the Soska twins, who I have never heard of before this movie, look like the cheeky girls at a goth disco. They turn up, assault a dancer for no reason then ask to have their bodyparts swapped for no sensible reason, other than they think it will be cool and they are rich enough to pay for it. This tells you pretty much what you need to know about the writers of this movie. There is the theme in this movie that wishing to use surgery to change your appearance is somehow leftfield or subcultural, however plastic surgery is now so mainstream celebrities don't even bother to conceal the fact they have had it. The only difference seems to be style. Most people by adulthood will realise that by dressing in back or adopting a subcultural dress code doesn't make people individualistic, especially when that subculture all look the same. If anything, they look more conformist in their uniforms.The movie seems to send quite a shallow message which is wearing black is cool, pointless violence is cool, swearing is cool, being rich is cool and prolonged torture is cool as long as its revenge. However, for revenge films to work properly the revenge has to be proportional. In this case its not. She is by far the worst person in the movie, however we are supposed to believe she is a good person because she still chats to her grandmother on the phone? That doesn't quite balance out against the sadism. As a result you don't care what happens to her.There are very few movies which deal with body modification which could have made this an interesting project. The movie seems to focus on the trendy for some fetish scene of body modification and is very shallow as a result. There didn't seem to be a mention of the well-known phenomena of people who wish to have healthy limbs removed and will risk death to achieve this outcome. There is surprisingly very little debate in this movie about the ethics of people who wish to have serious modifications of healthy tissue and the medical professions rejection of these procedures. The ridiculousness of some of the procedures in the movie beggars belief, but because Maybe this is why the bad guys are medics and Mary gets to torture them?This movie will likely only appeal to a mostly teenage subculture audience who already have an interest in body modification, which is very very few people. The problem with movies which focus on specific fetishes is they have a very narrow appeal. Unless you get off on bodymod stuff, which I suspect where most of the high ratings for this movie comes from, you may have a better use for your time.

I don't get how this was seen as some great independent film in the genre. Let's start with the solid squandering of it's lead star, who can pull off a range of emotions and is a crack shot in delivering sarcastic one liners. You get 5 minutes into the film with only a couple quick camera shots of anything that would suggest Mary is having a hard time, but even if it had showed more the protagonist is so Socially stunted and emotionally aloof that you're not able to really FEEL anything for her at this point. It's like watching Daria Med School Drop Out, if they ever continued that cartoon from the 90's. Even after the rape scene, you don't get any real sense that she was traumatized so much as she had just found the excuse to act a little psycho. This is where I do however have to give props for a body modification story line, which is something you don't usually see. Still the pacing or outright lack there of in which the story drags out, coupled with 95% of it's characters, including it's protagonist being extremely one dimensional in depth, which was a shame for the material that was being worked with. The nail in the coffin for me was the ending, don't bother trying to guess what that ending is kids, because there is absolutely no foreshadowing, to show us that some inserted surprise guest murderer comes from OUTTA NOWHERE to kill off like 3 characters including the protagonist and her Living Dead Doll bestie. Given the cast, and the basic story, this should have been a far better movie that would have been far more deserving of the accolades it has gotten. It's not a problem with story which, I get is just opinion in the case of reviews, it was the sheer lack and misuse of certain KEY STORYTELLING MECHANICS, such as 0 pacing, character development, story development and foreshadowing, to lead us to an ending that made no sense whatsoever. I know others will try to make it out like some grand thought out metaphor about women something, something, because with it's creators it is easy to project that idea onto what you are seeing. Looking at it from a, I'm not an indy movie brown noser perspective I saw the point of the film, if there even was one being more more like Sh-t Happens and some dude you never knew was involved in the story pops out of the shadows and kills you, than any sort of PROFOUND statement made through interpretive movie making. A sad disappointment for the hype around it.

Shame too, because the actings fine, the gore is rather well done, and the sensual/twisted edge works too. "American Mary" is borderline b-movie marathon worthy, and will probably eek onto the list because of the starving genre. The films set-up is solid, but right when these characters started to show some remorse, it got interesting, and Then it ended.. A bit abruptly and unsatisfyingly too. The two female leads saved a shoestring/somewhat inept script, and the film isn't particularly stylish considering its flashy subject matter.The rape scene and the torture scenes are the most effective scenes so it didn't drop the ball completely. I'm not a "it's great" or "it's horrible" guy on this one. "Mary" should keep fans of the horror genre pacified, but there have been better examples with lesser acclaim(see Hostel). It's alright. Could b worth a re watch down the road 60/100 again the two leads make this worthwhile, but not mind-blowing.Defo needed more character exploration, a better script, a bit more in the style/music department. Could have been great.

Canadian actress Katharine Isabelle popped onto the scene in Ginger Snaps, one of the most original and memorable films ever to emerge from a country that specializes in tired sequels and technically perfect but massively dull x-mas special and lifestyle movies.(Typically, they tried two sequels to Ginger, each worse than the other.) Mainstream should have snapped her up, she has both looks and talent, but this guilty pleasure from the Soska sisters, which branded it as a cult film from the moment they put film in the camera, nonetheless gets a great and memorable performance from Isabelle.She deftly plays against type, but being coy in a part which shows her visually to be stunning and characteristically to be a killer. It is a joy to watch her work,