(Olsen and Hawkes in a startling extract from Sean Durkin's superb debut. Image courtesy of Fox Searchlight.)
In the oblique and terrifying Martha Marcy May Marlene, a young woman’s physical and emotional recovery following her flight from a terrifying cult marks a formally audacious and visually sophisticated debut from the very gifted young filmmaker Sean Durkin.
Produced by Josh Mond and Antonio Campos, the collaborators of Campos’s superb 2009 debut Afterschool, Durkin has adroitly expanded his short film Mary Last Seen, into a disquieting and frightening portrait of surrender and coercion.
Durkin’s intricate and involving two-part structure unfolds largely through flashbacks, eschewing background and circumstance to depict the story of Martha (Elizabeth Olsen, truly stunning), a directionless and susceptible young woman recruited by a handsome stranger, Watts (Brady Corbet) into a collective hiding out in a large farmhouse in the Catskills.
From the eerie opening, Durkin creates a insinuating and creepy texture of disassociation and entrapment. Martha is introduced with a group of women, identically dressed, who must await their turn while the men finish their evening meal. Moments later, Martha is seen lighting out through the woods, the camera trailing her, as she uses the cover of darkness to aid her escape. Watts confronts her at a local diner, though surprisingly grants her freedom.
She makes contact with her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), her only surviving relative, and we learn that Martha has been absent two years. Lucy lives with her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), a New York developer. Lucy and her husband provide Martha with the necessary sanctuary in Connecticut three hours from where Lucy made contact with her wayward sister.
Durkin and his brilliant cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes (who also shot Afterschool) fracture time and space, fluidly shifting between the past and present as the torment and sexual subjugation Martha experiences at the farmhouse is contrasted against her overwhelming task of reclaiming her humanity and emotional bearings.
The filmmakers are especially adept at the startling use of water imagery. Normally a symbol of cleansing and re-birth, in Martha’s distracted and angry condition, it marks a particularly grungy form of violation. With its recurring use of recovered memories, water provides a propulsive sense of plunge and downward movement.
If Watts is Martha’s conduit into the cult, the leader is the suave and chillingly exact Patrick (John Hawkes). He carries a magnetic hold, personally and sexually, over many of the women. The wiry Hawkes (Winter’s Bone) assigns Martha her new identity, “Marcy May,” and presents a moment both enthralling and unsettling, serenading her with a number, “Marcy’s Song,” that underlines his charisma and magnetism.
The flashbacks also reveal Patrick’s darker and more vengeful side, a Manson manqué, like a moment involving shooting firearms and a violent home invasion that affirms his pathological skills at convincing his followers to commit the most egregious of crimes.
Water also marks Martha’s acute reminder of distress and dislocation and indicates her own moral imbalance, like a startling and revealing moment Martha suddenly disrobes and dives into the water near her sister’s vacation home naked. Her own rebirth is met with increasingly disturbing signs of breakdown and perhaps encroaching madness, demonstrated by anxiousness, violent mood swings and aberrant behavior, like the night she coiled up to Lucy in her bed during sex with Ted.
Like Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter, the movie uneasily moves between the imagination unbound and the nightmarish implications. “Do you ever get that feeling where you can’t tell if something is a memory or something you dreamed,” Martha inquires of her sister.
In her first significant part, Olsen imbues the work a jolting ferocity and damning insecurity, her body aquiver and arms twisted and bent. The mask of pain and discomfort during Patrick’s forced sexual actions against her leaves you shaken and wiped out.
Durkin’s spare script teases out information but never overburdens Martha, Lucy or the other primary characters. The strategy is sometimes frustrating but it coolly draws you in. Martha Marcy May Marlene is a mood piece but also a throwback. Durkin and Lipes eliminate primary colors, working almost exclusively in a muted palette that sustains the pervasively menacing tones and uncomfortable rhythms.
In the most radical notion, the filmmakers and Olsen’s performance suggest no matter the scenario, the cult or her sister’s hideaway, Martha is a prisoner of her own consciousness. Some have complained about the ending, but I find it a knock out closing, a conjuring act that involves the reappearance of one kind of monster, again linked to water, contrasted against an ambiguously uncomfortable and frightening harbinger of unease.
Martha Marcy May Marlene is one very fine movie.
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