Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011)
Directed by Sean Durkin
After several years of living with a cult, Martha finally escapes and calls her estranged sister, Lucy, for help. Martha finds herself at the quiet Connecticut home Lucy shares with her new husband, Ted, but the memories of what she experienced in the cult make peace hard to find. As flashbacks continue to torment her, Martha fails to shake a terrible sense of dread, especially in regard to the cult's manipulative leader.
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12 films that influenced Martha Marcy May Marlene
What critics say influenced Martha Marcy May Marlene
They sure are scary, especially given the remote setting, reminiscent of that in Michael Haneke's diabolical Funny Games.
Martha Marcy May Marlene recalls in spirit, if not in specifics, Winter's Bone and Ruby in Paradise .
At times, Durkin seems to be visually quoting Ingmar Bergman’s Persona as he shows the two women side by side, trying each other on for size.
Apart from the similar tense aesthetic the film shares with the previous year’s Winter’s Bone, the two pictures also feature John Hawkes in two very different, yet subtly sinister performances.
In Martha Marcy May Marlene, the younger sister of the Olsen twins delivers a breakthrough performance that will remind many of Jennifer Lawrence's excellent work last year in the similarly unsettling (though clearly superior) Winter's Bone.
And indeed it works in a similar quiet, spooky style as last year’s “Winter’s Bone,” which got Oscar nominations for best picture, for supporting actor John Hawkes and for its then-unknown star Jennifer Lawrence.
“Martha Marcy May Marlene,” the feature debut of writer-director Sean Durkin, was a big talker at Sundance, and it’s easy to see why: Its unsettling portrait of a little-seen existence rivals “Winter’s Bone.”
Writer-director Sean Durkin maintains the mystery about her even as flashbacks start to tell her story, the farm she used to live on, the charismatic guy (John Hawkes of “Winter’s Bone”) who took her in, the daily life in the cult where she was given a new name.
The film obviously wants to fill the same niche as Winter's Bone , and be the geographically precise study of a nasty backwoods cultured anchored by a groundbreaking female lead and John Hawkes as a scary supporting actor, but it's nowhere near as intelligent as that film was, nor as pictorially excellent, it does not have anything meaningful to say about the culture it depicts beyond "cults!
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It's a topic that's been handled in films before, perhaps most notably in Jane Campion's "Holy Smoke," but Durkin offers the most persuasively believable peek into the psyche of such a character I've ever seen.
Durkin has clearly studied some masters of the subjective eye - Polanski (Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion) and Haneke (Cache, Code Unknown).
While not a fun-and-popcorn entertainment movie, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” is a cautionary tale—a teaching piece, perhaps, a la the prison documentary horror “Scared Straight!”
Durkin is a collaborator of Antonio Campos, whose disturbing Afterschool attempted a similar kind of harsh, gnawing suspense but was undercut by Campos’ formal trickery.
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Durkin has clearly studied some masters of the subjective eye - Polanski (Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion) and Haneke (Cache, Code Unknown).
Sarah Paulson (2008's " The Spirit ") is quite good in her own right as elder sister Lucy, her relationship with her sister a war between true empathetic concern and bitter contempt, while John Hawkes (2010's " Winter's Bone ") is memorably assured and slimy as insincere, opportunistic cult leader Patrick.