Martha Marcy May Marlene
There are some subjects that honestly, would seem almost impossible to present in movies with any objectivity. Among those is the notion of what it would be living in a cult environment. Harder still would be the emotional damage after one was able to escape from that sort of life.
In his stunning film, “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” writer-director Sean Durkin make those impossibilities tangible and riveting as we see Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) escape from the rural compound run by Patrick (John Hawkes, enigmatic and charismatic), and then live with her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), and her husband (Hugh Dancy). Lucy worries for this sister, whom she has not heard from in two years, but Martha is unable to communicate what she went through, becoming increasingly paranoid about whether the cult is after her to take her back.
The film had me up until the terrible cut to black that ends the film, a moment that seems like Durkin trying too hard to channel Christopher Nolan (“Memento,” “Inception”) when it comes to leaving the audience uncertain at the end. That’s a shame, because the rest of “Martha Marcy May Marlene” is a powerful, emotional experience. The cult environment, and the people who populate it, are written in broad, one-dimensional strokes, but it’s the psychological unraveling going on in Martha’s mind that holds our biggest interest; we see enough of life on Patrick’s compound, and what Martha is sometimes forced to do as a part of that life, to understand that her paranoia is fully justified. The tension Martha’s instability causes with Lucy and her husband is the driving force of the film, and Paulson meets Olsen beat for revelatory beat in an emotional journey that leaves the viewer wrung out, and wondering whether Martha (whom Patrick called Marcy May) will ever be able to recover. Of course, one of the questions we leave “Martha Marcy May Marlene” asking is whether Martha will have the chance to recover, or whether her fate will lead her back, invariably, to Patrick. This is one case where I’d prefer to know which one it was as I left the theatre.
