Martha Marcy May Marlene explores the fractured identity of a young woman who spends two years in a cult of sorts before escaping to stay with her sister. The young woman (Elizabeth Olsen) was named Martha by her family, but given the name Marcy May by the cult leader, Patrick (an astonishingly good John Hawkes). Marlene is the name each of the women at the cult use to answer the phone with when someone calls, usually to track down a missing girl. The names reflect blood family, adopted family, and then the collective of women who service the men in the cult, and both compete with and betray each other for the attention of Patrick.
The film starts with Martha’s escape from the cult, and she goes to stay with her estranged sister, Lucy and her husband, Ted, in an expensive summer rental on a lake in Connecticut. We learn of Martha’s life in the cult in flashback, with the flashbacks at least equalling in length her difficult re-entry into Lucy’s life and attempts to come to terms with what took place on the farm inhabited by the cult. The scenes with the cult are much stronger than those after her escape. Hawkes gives a typically powerful performance (what with this and Winter’s Bone, he deserves more recognition), alternating tenderness and menace. The early scenes are all tenderness and tranquility. Patrick preys on damaged girls, giving them a home, a sense of belonging and purpose. But the darkness soon emerges. Each new recruit is ritually drugged and raped, the women serve the men, and its members rob houses when their experiment in communal farming is not enough to pay the bills. The women look after each other, but they also prepare the new arrivals to be raped and rationalize the violence as part of the life of the community.
The scenes in the summer house are weaker. Lucy doesn’t understand what Martha has been through, and Martha never tells her. She knows that Martha has been hurt in some way, but her unorthodox behavior — stripping naked to swim in the lake in front of her husband, coming into their room when she and Ted are having sex — along with lack of appetite and any apparent exuberance, strain her marriage (Ted is a caricature of a selfish, status-obsessed young professional) and rekindle whatever unspoken history of discord with Martha that Lucy once had. But Sarah Paulson, who plays Lucy manages to avoid her own character veering off into caricature and its a sensitive performance.
The film tries too hard to draw parallels between life in the cult and life in a repressed modern family. At one point Lucy and Ted essentially drug Martha to calm her down during a party. The message is at times heavy-handed: privacy and materialism outside the cult produce shallow repressed relationships, while communalism inside the cult permits exploitation. First time director, Sean Durkin, messes with his audience too much, leading us to believe on two separate occasions that the cult is breaking into Lucy and Ted’s summer house to retrieve Martha when in fact both are flashbacks to earlier home invasions involving Martha. And the film ends awkwardly. The perfect ending would have been about 90 seconds earlier, with Martha shot from a distance, bobbing up and down in the lake.
That said, and for all its imperfections, this is well worth watching, if only for the performances of Olsen and Hawkes. Durkin doesn’t beat us over the head with the reasons why women from troubled homes might seek solace in a patriarchal cult, and submit themselves to abuse. It seems almost natural; community and horror merge into one another. Olsen is mostly quiet, but always expressive as she processes, first the cult and then the pretensions of her sister and the outside world that she had escaped into the cult to avoid. Recommended.
P.S. Elizabeth Olsen is listed are appearing in the forthcoming American remake of Oldboy. Say it ain’t so.