Martha Marcy May Marlene (***3/4)

I know this indie drama was effective because I was still a little unsettled ten or fifteen minutes after it ended. It would be incorrect to say it was about a cult (a word the film itself avoids), or why someone would join one. It is instead about a transition back to normalcy; the curious title intends to evoke the fragile state of one uncertain of herself. If this were a war film one would say it is about PTSD. Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) has just left, maybe escaped, after a time with the group, and is staying with her sister (Sarah Paulson).

Flashbacks depict the place she has just left, an upstate New York farmhouse. The dozen or so folks there seem like latter-day flower children practicing a back-to-nature sort of self-reliance. John Hawkes plays the leader, whose palpable creepiness (to me, anyway) is the only sign, at first, of things gone amiss. You’ve seen these kind of flashbacks before, where the scene in the present merges into a similar-looking one in the past. But first-time writer-director Sean Durkin does it about as well as I’ve seen, so that it takes you a few seconds to realize the scene has moved from the sister’s house to the farmhouse. As for Martha, the past blurs with the present, and reality with paranoia.

Durkin gives hints about Martha’s back story in her interactions with the sister, who is living with her fiancé (Hugh Dancy). The story is about family dynamics and Martha’s erratic behavior. But the mood comes close to psychological horror. Or suspense, more than horror. In any case, Durkin and Olsen give us one of the most subtle, yet gripping portrayals of a damaged individual.

IMDB link

viewed 8/22/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening]