Where are we? When are we? As Martha Marcy May Marlene opens we see men and women working in
fields and a farmhouse, chopping wood, harvesting, laundering, cooking. At the
end of the day, the men eat slowly, quietly, huddled around a dark table in a
dark kitchen. They slowly file out and the women take their place, finally
their turn to eat the meal. The sun sets. Members of this group go to sleep on
mattresses packed on the floor of unfurnished rooms.
In the haze of daybreak, one of the young women (Elizabeth
Olsen) slips away from the farmhouse, across the fields and comes upon a thick
slice of asphalt breaking up the natural world and helping to narrow down the
period of time in which she lives. She crosses the road and disappears into the
forest beyond. We follow her as she seems to escape, eventually ending up in a modern
small town where she uses the pay phone outside of the diner to call her
sister. “Martha?” her sister says. “Where are you?”
We learn that Martha’s family hasn’t heard from her in two
years, knowing only vaguely that she was “upstate” with a “boyfriend.” Her
sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), and Lucy’s husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), pick her up
and drive her back to their vacation house. They quickly decide to take her in,
to help he get on her feet. They seem remarkably uncurious as to where Martha
has been or what happened to her. Something
is so very wrong here that, though this couple’s attempts at kindness is sympathetic,
their situational blind spots contribute to the film’s dread. How can they so
easily ignore the warning signs that this young woman is so troubled?
After all, what could explain her behavior? She seems, in
subtle ways, unaccustomed to what we would call a relatively normal life. The
house in which she now lives is an expansive wood-and-glass lakeside domicile
surrounded by woods. It’s modern yet secluded, different from where she was,
but with resonances of reminders. She will cast her gaze nervously about her
surroundings, as if anticipating sudden danger, or else remembering the
possibility. The married couple can’t quite see how disturbed Martha is. There
are unspoken histories between these characters, familial tensions that are
teased out with some subtlety by the capable cast.
The full extent of Martha’s previous two years is slowly parceled
out by the film, which slips between the two time periods with chilling
silkiness in the editing. We continually return to that farmhouse with the eerie
timeless quality of the dress and codes of conduct. We come to learn that the
group of people living there are all enthralled by a cult leader (John Hawkes,
seemingly effortlessly disquieting) who slowly draws his victims in with his
soft-spoken philosophizing and simply plucked guitar compositions, creating a
sense of community. Then, we come to understand how he uses psychological
domination and torture as well as ritualized patterns of behavior, a strict work
ethic, an unflinching schedule, and punishing initiations including shocking
violence and rape, to control and retain his followers. As what we know more about
Martha’s time amongst these people, the darker and more disturbing the
implications grow.
As the trauma of her time in the cult regularly intrudes
upon the film’s present tense, the collision draws the atmosphere into the same
haze of paranoia and aftershocks of anxiety that Martha is feeling. This is
remarkably assured debut work for the writer-director Sean Durkin who keeps the
focus on fuzzy compositions and ominously open spaces in the blocking and
backgrounds of shots. (In some ways it reminded me a bit of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, but that’s a fairly
obscure connection for the benefit of what is likely to be only a small portion
of those reading this). The visual style of the picture matches Martha’s fuzzy
mental state, clear and warm at times, but all-too-soon giving way to confusion
and cold, unflinching traumatic memories. It’s a slow mystery – what is the
full extent of the awfulness of what happened to her, and will she get the help
she needs? – that is in some ways a slow-motion horror movie. One sequence late
in the film is a like a quieter, simpler, though no less startling, version of
something right out of a slasher flick.
The film tells the story of Martha’s steps towards a new,
better life, tying it relentlessly to the slow and steady reveal of what she
must overcome. It took great courage for her to escape her situation, but is it
possible for Martha to outrun her past? We are given reason for hope, but as
the end credits crash in, it’s still very much a tense, pressing, frustratingly
unanswerable open question. In that moment, the film reveals itself to be a bit
too teasing in its restraint to be fully believed (I’m tempted to call it
Haneke lite). But it’s overall an undeniably effective piece of filmmaking and
a strong debut.
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