Ariāna Osborne

For most of Mārama (2026) Ariāna Osborne is not talking. Toby Stephens's Nathaniel Cole talks, at length, with the ease of a man who has never been contradicted in his own house, and Taratoa Stappard keeps the camera on Mary while he does it. Osborne lets us watch her weigh each sentence and decide how much of it to believe. Mary has learned her manners in a language that is not hers, and Osborne shows us the account she is keeping of what those manners have cost. It is a performance made almost entirely of listening, and the film would not stand up without it.

We have one film to go on, and we should say so. Osborne trained at Toi Whakaari, the New Zealand drama school, and came up through New Zealand television: a part in Millie Lies Low (2021), a run on Shortland Street (2022), then Tui in Madam (2024), the role that got her noticed at home, and Willa in Tangata Pai (2025), a series played partly in te reo Māori. We have not reviewed any of them and will not pretend to judge them. What they add up to is a pattern. She is cast, again and again, as Māori women, often speaking two languages, and Mary is the first time that pattern has been put in front of an audience outside New Zealand.

Stappard is the director who has so far got the most out of her, largely because he trusts her to do less. Twenty minutes into Mārama we noticed that we had stopped following what Cole was saying and were only watching Mary hear it, which is not what usually happens when Toby Stephens is talking; the camera had stayed on her long enough that her silence had become the scene. By her own account the preparation was rushed: "I only had a few weeks to prepare for Mārama – to do the pre-production, learn the scenes, the stunts and the English dialect, as well as reo lessons – so I guess I was thrown in the deep end." None of the hurry shows. The one thing we would hold against the performance is not hers: the film loses its nerve for a stretch in the second half, and she is left holding a script that has briefly stopped helping her.

She has said she means to leave New Zealand for work, probably by way of Australia to the United States. The danger for an actor who does stillness this well is that larger productions will ask for less of it, faster, or for something else entirely. We hope somebody over there has watched Mārama and noticed what she was doing while Stephens talked.