Durkin’s debut is atmospheric but not quite satisfying enough look at the danger of cults
Director: Sean Durkin
Cast: Elizabeth Olsen (Martha/Marcy May), John Hawkes (Patrick), Sarah Paulson (Lucy), Hugh Dancy (Ted), Brady Corbett (Watts), Christopher Abbott (Max), Maria Dizzia (Katie), Julia Garner (Sarah), Louisa Krause (Zoe)
When 22-year-old Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) surfaces after two years off-the-grid, seeking help from her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy), they think she’s still the same slightly selfish screw-up she’s always been. But unknown to them, Martha has spent those missing years rechristened as Marcy Man in a patriarchal Manson-like cult in the Catskills run by charismatic Patrick (John Hawkes). As Martha attempts to readjust, she is haunted by flashbacks to the cult and a growing paranoia that her escape from Patrick’s clutches might only be temporary.
Durkin’s debut film is a masterclass in unsettling atmosphere. With its gloomy photography and stretches of unsettling silence, it never lets the viewer relax. Lucy and Ted’s luxury country house ends up feeling as unsafe and uncertain as the cult’s rickety farm. Well-handled cuts take us suddenly from present to flash-back – for example, a cut sees Martha dive from Ted’s boat to land in the waterfall near the cult’s farm. Auditory and visual transitions run throughout the whole film – Martha’s sleeping positions in the house suddenly mirrored in flashbacks, or food preparation in one timeline transitioning to the same task in the other. It makes everything feel as disjointed and jagged to us as it does to Martha.
This unsettling uncertainty, where the “safe” environment of Lucy and Ted’s house increasingly mirrors the unsafe world of the cult, is a neat way of suggesting the struggle of people like Martha to truly escape. It also complements a very effective, star-making turn from Elizabeth Olsen. At times hostile, Martha is just as likely to withdraw, Olsen showing her deeply unsettled by everyday acts like her sister combing her hair (an act reminiscent to her of the cult’s sexual abuse), or blankly not comprehending the society’s everyday rules. Desperate for reassurance, she still clings to the cult’s empty mantras, lashing out with furious venom when she feels vulnerable. It’s a soulful, damaged and delicate performance that carries much of the film.
Martha Marcy May Marlene captures the horrific, insidious manipulation of the cult. John Hawkes is very good as a quietly charismatic, intimidating man who, without ever raising his voice, controls every situation he is in through self-confidence and absolute certainty. The cult is firmly hierarchical, with Patrick at the top, men below and women at the bottom, serving the men – from cooking food (and not eating so much as a crumb until they are finished) to taking part in partner-swapping orgies watched by Patrick. All women are initiated into the cult through a “cleansing” ritual – being drugged by the other women, then raped by Patrick and they and the other members are brain-washed into pride at being “chosen” for Patrick’s wisdom.
Durkin leaves the nature of the cult deliberately ill-defined, in itself a comment on the shallow emptiness of these movements and the intellectual mediocrity of their leaders. When a row develops over dinner, Martha responds to the (admittedly smug) Ted by angrily parroting the cult’s empty, depth-free anti-money and anti-capitalist statements. The cult roughly follows the Manson Family playbook in breaking into homes and stealing (or worse) to fund its activities. Its main function is dehumanising its members, so they will think nothing of killing and abandon all personal boundaries. Martha still suffers from the latter: used to sleeping in communal rooms, she thinks nothing of wandering into Ted and Lucy’s room and lying down to sleep on their bed while they noisily have sex in the other half of it (they are not pleased, much to her bemusement).
There is good stuff here – which makes it disappointing that the film ends up, for me, feeling slightly unsatisfying. We get no real sense of what made Martha join this cult, or who she was before it sunk its claws into her. We also get very little sense of what made Martha decide to escape. The film suggests maybe her reaction to the murder of the owner of one of the wealthy homes they break into: but since the film later suggests that murder (and Patrick’s teaching that killing is somehow doing people a favour) is a fairly regular occurrence in the cult, this also feels unlikely.
The film also avoids really diving into interesting questions about readjustment and de-programming from traumatic experiences. For all it brings Martha’s PTSD to the fore, it doesn’t really show much development in either Martha’s feelings towards the cult or her understanding of her experiences. Now it’s true the road to recovery isn’t a straight line of narratively smooth continual healing, but a long, complex journey with many setback. But as a film, focussing solely on this part of her life ends up rather repetitive, like we’re struck watching just part of a longer story.
Durkin’s film is instead really a study of paranoia – Martha’s growing, unspoken, fear that the cult is coming for her and her family. But for those fears to really work, we need to feel the cult is capable of pre-meditated murder – the only killing we see is sudden and unprepared, other house entries showing the cult go to great lengths to be undetected. The film caps with a deliberately ambiguous sequence that may or may not be a mix of reality, chance, coincidence and Martha’s paranoid fears. But it’s a sequence that feels like it’s been created to conclude the film, rather than something that grows organically throughout, blunting some of its impact.
It’s a shame as there is a lot to like in this impressive, atmospheric debut, not least Durkin’s coldly unsettling direction, Olsen’s terrific performance and very good supporting turns from an exasperated-but-patient Sarah Paulson as Lucy and Hawkes’ dark, quiet charisma. But Martha Marcy May Marlene eventually boils down to telling you that being in a cult is traumatic, without really exploring the nuances of the struggle to overcome that or what pulls you into that situation in the first place. By focusing on paranoia, it feels like it tells only part of a wider, more interesting story.
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