“Martha Marcy May Marlene,” an emotionally damaged young woman escapes an abusive cult and attempts to take shelter with her sister. The movie stars Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, in the role of the woman. Her performance, and the performances of the other actors, should earn them Oscar nominations.
The woman’s name is Martha. Marcy May is the name the leader of the hippie-like cult she joins gives her. And Marlene is the name she says when she and every other woman at the farmhouse the cult occupies answers the phone. We’re given almost no information about Marcy’s upbringing. Since her sister appears to be her only surviving family member, we can only assume her past contains painful details. Marcy simply appears on the farm, and a seemingly kind woman takes her under her wings and teaches her the ways of the collective. In time, Marcy will perform the same role with another girl. Patrick, the leader of the group, has kind eyes and a smile full of wrinkles.
There’s a glint of evil in his expression, though, and his words are calculated to manipulate the women who populate his farm into thinking, doing and behaving precisely as he desires. (The writing is chilling, and good.) Still, his initial charm wins over the women, all of whom are damaged or vulnerable in some way. The movie is rather brilliant in the way it slowly reveals the cult to be more malicious than it initially appears. Early on, things seem quirky, like Patrick’s insistence that all of the new woman have sex with him. Things gradually become more harrowing until a scene in which Patrick tries to coax Marcy into shooting either a cat or one of the guys that belong to the cult provides a clear dividing point between murky and black-as-night dark. Eventually, circumstances I will not reveal convince Marcy to break away and call her sister, with whom she hasn’t spoken in two years. Her sister retrieves her and takes her back to the lake house she and her husband own.
Again, the damage Marcy has suffered slowly comes to light. The scene in which she crawls into the same bed in which her sister and her husband are making love shows she has no grasp of accepted behavior. I write about these events as though director Sean Durkin presents them in a linear fashion, but he doesn’t. Rather, he jumps back and forth between Marcy’s time on the farm and at her sister’s house as a way of conveying her fractured state of mind. Supporting this notion in the way the cuts become more frequent and slightly confusing toward the end of the movie as Marcy becomes more frantic. More intriguing than the splintered structure of the movie are the performances. Olsen is remarkable as a girl who seems to exist on a razor’s edge between normal and deranged. In one scene, she’ll have an almost coherent conversation with her sister; in the next, she’ll look confused as her sister yells at her for swimming naked in the lake, where the neighbors’ children can see her; and in the next, she’ll launch into hysterics because she believes the cult has found her.
Olsen displays an impressive range in the movie, and drew me into Marcy’s predicament. John Hawkes is just as effective as Patrick, who doles out compassion with a spoonful of menace. His performance is never cheesy or theatrical, but always down to earth, even in his more threatening moments. The knowledge that Patricks actually exist adds a disturbing undercurrent to his scenes. He might not have been channeling Charles Manson, but the infamous cult leader certainly came to mind. While “Martha Marcy May Marlene” is not entertaining, it is suspenseful and absorbing. If you don’t like ambiguity, you might react negatively to its final shot, although I think Durkin tells us everything we need to know about what happens next. My best guess is that viewers who enjoy dark dramas will appreciate seeing this movie once it’s released on DVD and via On Demand. Although leisurely paced, it’s well acted, intelligent, cleverly structured and unsettling.
Rated R for violence, sexual content, nudity and language. Three-and-a-half stars out of four. Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.