Martha Marcy May Marlene | Film review

Her given name is Martha, but she also answers to Marcy May. As played by Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sibling of Mary-Kate and Ashley, she’s a woman lost in her own mind. Her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who hasn’t seen or heard from Martha in two years, has brought her to stay at a summer house in Connecticut. Quickly, Martha’s behavior goes from strange to stranger: She insults Lucy and her new husband (Hugh Dancy), interrupts the two during sex and periodically spouts odd mantras. At best, she seems perpetually disoriented—a bundle of nerves, constantly looking over one shoulder, her thoughts always elsewhere.

Disorientation is the guiding principle of Sean Durkin’s gripping, remarkably assured debut, which operates almost entirely within the frazzled and paranoid headspace of its title character. Through slivers of information, it eventually becomes clear where Martha disappeared for two years: She was under the influence of a cult, operating from a remote commune in the Catskills. The group’s leader, played with Zen calm and earthy menace by John Hawkes, uses his powers of persuasion to nudge female converts into sexual subservience—and, later, into other horrifying acts of obedience.

Mirroring the pendulum swing of his heroine’s memory, Durkin crosscuts quietly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, between Martha’s days on the farm and her tumultuous time in Connecticut. What we’re seeing, simultaneously, is her programming and deprogramming: This is a film that understands both the methodology of cults and the psychological fallout that occurs when someone tries to break free from one. Durkin directs with the eerie formal prowess of a young Roman Polanski, but it’s Olsen, with her expressive features and alien delivery, who seems poised to inspire her own following.