Review of Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) by Jerry R — 08 Aug 2012

A lot of movies come packaged with the moniker "psychological thriller", but rare is the movie that actually earns it. A good psychological thriller plays with our heads, takes us inside the mind of a tormented soul and even asks a few questions that may not even have an answer. Hitchcock was an expert at that kind of thriller, but few filmmakers these days really have the skills to pull one off.

First-time feature director Sean Durkin has a sure hand. He knows how to build suspense and is wise enough to allow his film to flow naturally and not take a lot of forced right turns in fear of the audience growing bored. His offering is Martha Marcy May Marlene, a tongue-twister of a title that only makes sense as the film goes along. His film doesn't succeed completely, but at least swings for the fences. It tells the story of a young girl in her early 20s who has spent the past two years living as part of a cult in a small farmhouse in New York. Occupying the house are a dozen or so other women, and apparently only two men. The girl is named Martha (Elizabeth Olsen). The cult leader, Patrick (John Hawkes) gives her the name Marcy May. To the outside world, she is supposed to address herself as Marlene.

As the film opens, Martha runs out of the farmhouse, across the street, into the woods and to the local coffee shop. It takes us only a second to realize that she is escaping. She sit down at a booth and has coffee to calm her nerves. Then she surprised when one of the men who work under Patrick at the farm sits at the table across from her, and is even more surprised how easily he lets her go. This single act may or may not be a contributing factor to her paranoia.

Martha calls her long-estranged sister to come and pick her up. Her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) has no idea where she's been, and comes to take her back to her lake house where she lives with her husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). Martha doesn't tell Lucy or Ted where she's been, which seems odd until we realize that she isn't exactly sure what's real and what is not. So much psychological programming has taken her mind away from reality that she has a difficult time getting things in chronological order.

The film moves back and forth between Martha's present with Lucy and Ted and her life at the compound. We get flashbacks to her time in the cult and begin to understand her disorientation. Patrick, the cult's leader,is a quiet, passive manipulator who knows exactly how to zero in on anyone and break down their defenses. He has a narrowing gaze and a quietly motivating voice. Take note of a scene late in the film when he calms the fury a man who is about to call the police on him. Look closely at the way he breaks the man down just with his voice and his words.

My expectation for a good psychological thriller is that it should leave us to figure out some of the details on our own. The problem here is the film raises many questions that it never answers questions that fill in large gaps in the story. How did she come to join the cult? What event made her leave? Why was the security guard so eager to let her run away? I hate it when a movie gives us a compelling structure then refuses to work out the details.

What does work are the performances, by John Hawkes at the cult leader, and especially by Elizabeth Olsen as Martha. What Olsen does with this performance is a textbook example of complete control. There are long stretches of the film when she says absolutely nothing, she holds the screen in quiet moments that hold more weight than a lot of puny dialogue. She has a beautiful, placid face that hides and inner-torment. As the film goes on, we can see more and more of her paranoia bubbling to the surface. Olsen is the younger sister of Mary Kate and Ashley, and years from now, if she continues with brilliant work like this will have people saying, as they do with Jeff Bridges: "There's the talent in that family.".