Review: Namaka (2025)

Frank Merle’s Namaka begins with the promise of a holiday movie and gradually turns into something stranger: a modest supernatural tale about desire, fidelity, and the danger of wanting what one has been warned not to want. 

Alex Cook (Jason Markoff), an American musician from the Midwest, arrives in Hawaii with his wife, Erica, and her extended family for what is supposed to be an uncomplicated vacation. The island, however, has other plans for him.  

While wandering alone through the forest, Alex encounters Namaka (Ash Tsai), a mysterious young woman dressed in traditional Hawaiian attire. Their meeting is initially innocent enough. Alex is composing a song on his ukulele; Namaka is curious about him. But when the two stumble upon a dead body and Namaka abruptly disappears, the film begins to shift from holiday fantasy toward supernatural mystery. The police find no body, and Alex is left wondering whether he has imagined the encounter.  

The answer, naturally, is more complicated. Guy Torino (Jamie Kennedy), a beach-bum podcaster who specialises in the island’s darker folklore, tells Alex that Namaka may be a demigod with an appetite for human affection. Her interest in him is not merely romantic. It is possessive—and potentially fatal.  

Merle’s film is at its most interesting when it treats Namaka less as a conventional monster than as a personification of temptation. Alex is attracted to her despite being married, and the supernatural premise gives physical form to a familiar moral problem: desire does not become less consequential simply because it arrives in an irresistible package. The film’s eventual suggestion is that this cycle of temptation will persist unless people learn to exercise some control over themselves.  

There is an intriguing Fatal Attraction quality to the setup, with Hawaiian mythology replacing the domestic thriller’s adulterous affair. Namaka can be seductive, threatening, and finally violent, but she does not allow Alex to become merely a victim of an otherworldly woman. His attraction is his own. In one of the film’s more pointed exchanges, Namaka calls him a man of contradictions: he values privacy while constantly recording himself, and although he insists that he does not want her, his body betrays him. It is perhaps the clearest expression of what the film is trying to say.  

The Hawaiian setting supplies the film with some of its strongest imagery. Richard Trejo photographs the winding coastal roads, waterfalls, rainforests, beaches, volcanic terrain, and sea cliffs with a documentary-like precision. The natural beauty creates a useful tension with the claustrophobic encounters in the forest, while also separating Alex’s family holiday from the secret world he enters without them.  

Jamie Kennedy gives Guy a lightly comic presence, and the character’s podcasting eccentricity occasionally threatens to turn exposition into parody. Yet Guy also becomes an unlikely guide through the mystery. Tsai brings a sensual, slightly melancholy quality to Namaka, while Markoff makes Alex convincing as a man caught between marital responsibility, artistic frustration, and an attraction he cannot quite master.  

Namaka does not entirely escape the limitations of its low-key supernatural setup. Its mythology is explained rather than discovered, and some of its dramatic turns feel more functional than surprising. Still, the film’s modest ambitions are clear. It is less interested in reinventing folklore than in using it to externalise a very old human problem: the temptation to mistake desire for destiny.