Review: Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) and her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson).

Martha Marcy May Marlene
Directed by: Sean Durkin
Starring: Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, John Hawkes, Hugh Dancy
Screening in: Melbourne International Film Festival

Subtle, atmospheric, and with a nail-bitingly ambiguous ending, writer/director Sean Durkin’s debut feature is almost perfect. It’s a character study of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), who flees an abusive cult in upstate New York and throws herself on the mercy of her estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), but who is irreparably damaged by her experience.

What I loved most about this film was the way its tone is so finely calibrated between idyllic and terrifying. It opens on bucolic scenes of young homesteaders at work on a rural estate. The first hint that this is no ordinary farm comes when all the men sit down to dinner first, leaving the women waiting patiently in the shadows.

Likewise, the Connecticut lake house rented by Lucy and her architect husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) is your typical bourgie weekender. A lovely place to escape city stress, yet we also see it through Martha’s eyes – as both obscenely decadent and frighteningly vulnerable.

Patrick (John Hawkes) serenades 'Marcy May'. Thankfully, not with 'Helter Skelter'.

Meandering elegantly between Martha’s days at the lake house and impressionistic flashbacks of her time in the cult, Durkin builds menace slowly and casually as Martha’s memories leach into and poison her recovery. Durkin uses long takes and observationally framed shots to capture small, devastating interactions. Subtly, he lets the horror creep up on us as it must have done for Martha and, like her, we dread that her mates back at the commune are coming to get her.

Frustratingly, Martha has no distance from what’s happened to her. She struggles even to name it, let alone confess it to a sister whose previous abandonment she still seems to resent. And as her behaviour escalates from social inappropriateness to utter hysteria, we begin to glimpse how grotesquely her search for a meaningful life has crushed her. (The title gestures to the palimpsest of her identity.)

Olsen is the sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley, but while I was watching the film, I didn’t notice the family resemblance. She reminded me much more of Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary – that same infuriatingly opaque passivity. Olsen spends most of the film with a blank facial expression, yet what looks like petulance to Lucy and Ted we can recognise as confusion and terror.

Hawkes, who played Teardrop in Debra Granik’s terrific Winter’s Bone, channels another kind of menace here as Patrick, the quietly charismatic, Charles Manson-esque cult leader. Rather than being a cartoonish bully, he projects a peaceful, soulful air that’s all the more chilling when he’s inciting unspeakable acts.

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