Martha Marcy May Marlene is the story of a young woman’s disjointed sense of self, a snapshot of a girl negotiating life in between identities, homes and, as the difficult title suggests, names. Her descent into a backwoods cult in rural New York and re-assimilation into her former existence are illustrated through a hazy mélange of dreams, paranoia, and hallucinations, permeated by a current of distorted reality. She is known as Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) to the sister whose lakehouse provides an uneasy refuge following her escape from a nameless countryside commune, where dozens of young people live under the direction and influence of a wiry, chillingly charismatic leader named Patrick (John Hawkes).
Director Sean Durkin makes a stunning debut, strikingly self-assured as he watches Martha wade through the remnants of her tattered psyche; the summation of two years of emotional manipulation and physical abuse. Durkin remains ambiguous about the particulars of the group’s beliefs and practices; he allows the audience to discern what’s happening in as imprecise a manner as Martha does, and, in doing so, parallels our bewilderment with Martha’s own. Indeed the word “cult” is never even spoken throughout the film, and when she’s asked what’s wrong, Martha answers as truthfully as she can: that she doesn’t know. “It wasn’t interesting to me to be obvious,” Durkin commented to The Huffington Post, shortly before the film’s theatrical opening. The director’s provocative love affair with the off-centre close-up also ensures that Olsen is always framed by that same indistinctness.
The ultimate triumph of the film is Elizabeth Olsen’s acting debut. Weighty with both her painful frailty and a sense of unwavering resolve, Olsen’s Martha bruises easily but shoots a gun like she means it. She is reactive without being passive, laboured in her movements while fluid in her delivery. You always want to know more about her; how she feels and what she saw and how it happened. But what you’re given is an ache, the same gnawing terror she suffers from because she knows and doesn’t know in equal amounts.
The film delicately constructs an atmosphere of fear, aided in spades by Hawkes’ masterful rendering of Patrick. In an especially haunting scene, in which Patrick performs Marcy’s Song, his portrayal ensures that an acoustic serenade sounds like both a love song and a threat, slowly constricting around your throat.
Martha Marcy May Marlene’s greatest strength is its vagueness; speaking without saying anything on the psychological malleability of broken youth, on the delicacy of human relationships and on the vulnerability caused by loneliness. It’s a difficult film — both to follow and to watch. We’re left dangling from a precipice, utterly unsure of what’s to come. And in the end, Martha is a shadowy representation of a girl we think we know. Just a picture, that’s all.
