Martha Marcy May Marlene
DIRECTED BY SEAN DURKIN
A hauntingly beautiful, artfully structured, pitch-perfect psychological thriller, Martha Marcy May Marlene is one of 2011’s best films. That it’s also the first feature from British Columbia native Sean Durkin—named best director at Sundance—is frankly amazing.
No less auspicious is the acting debut of Elizabeth Olsen, junior sibling to Tinseltown brand titans Mary-Kate and Ashley, and a major talent in the making. Here, as a character née Martha and later labeled Marcy-May and Marlene, she more than holds her own against a fine followup performance from John Hawkes, so magnetic and menacing in 2010’s Winter’s Bone. This time he’s both fearsome and tender as Patrick, the charismatic head of a pastoral, Catskills-based commune-cum-cult that, like its leader, is at once seductive and terrifying.
The film opens as Martha makes a desperate escape, followed by a frantic phone call to her estranged sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who’s vacationing with her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), at an upscale lakeside holiday home. Once restored to the family fold, Martha remains insistently secretive but appears to be safe and sound, until it emerges that, mentally, she’s far from out of the woods.
Durkin, who also wrote the screenplay, seamlessly interweaves Martha’s daydream memories of incremental indoctrination with her present-moment familial interactions, and initially it’s the former that are most idyllic. Although well-meaning, Lucy is uptight and, understandably, can’t entirely subdue her disapproval at her sister’s prolonged disappearance. (One senses she and Martha have long shared a fraught relationship.) Ted, too, proves irritable, and together he and Lucy are firmly ensconced in what Martha perceives as credulous bourgeois banality. Martha’s early flashbacks, in contrast, paint Patrick and his collectivist charges as empathetic, enlightened, and disdainful of materialist trappings—a siren call to a wayward 99-percenter, beset by post-adolescent uncertainty.
Gradually, though, Martha’s elliptical recollections begin to reveal the true extent of her trauma, and Durkin tightens the tonal screws to achieve a profound, sustained foreboding. The young director cites Hitchcock as a major influence, and evokes both Haneke and Polanski in his deft modulation of an ominous mood. Olsen, meanwhile, invests the deliberately inscrutable Martha with a wholly credible blend of vulnerability, defiance, disorientation, and steadily increasing paranoia.
If the film does strike a false note, it’s in the form of some exculpatory hokum, uttered by Patrick in response to the plot’s most sinister development. (Durkin, for the record, claims to have derived much of his cultspeak through real-life research.) In truth, it hardly detracts from an offering that is otherwise intelligent, provocative, and precociously assured, and which captivates from the first strains of its eerie score to its indelibly unsettling final frame.